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Arch Linux: The AUR malicious packages incident continues to happen
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Yeah, I’ve cleared out my AUR packages after the first hack.
It’s not worth the risk. Just like I don’t keep npm installed on my machine.
AUR’s period of altruism is over. The cat is out of the bag. Scammers are onto this trend, so now they’re going to keep on hacking AUR accounts in perpetuity.
…In fact, I think AUR needs a dramatic overhaul, or even a depreciation, as its security model just isn’t viable anymore. And Arch (the organization) is in the hook for incidents like this, as the AUR is hosted on archlinux.org.
Yeah. I think it would be better if Arch Linux added the most used packages in AUR to its official repo. Then we can mitigate the packages abused by threat actors, and Arch Linux users will be more secure from malicious packages.
So what, can we trust the debian repo? Where do we get software from?
Debian/Arch official repos fetch software directly from the distro maintainers, while AUR packages can be uploaded by anyone. So theoretically, Debian/Arch repos are considered more secure than AUR packages. Even Flatpaks are also more secure than AUR packages.
How can previously installed AUR packages be compromised, though?
When the upstream URL gets updated with the malicious uploaders new URL. There is no warning shown in the process; the only way to check it is to inspect the PKGBUILD manually.
The Debian repo, yeah. Generally.
AUR is particularly risky because anyone can submit software.
But if you heavily rely on 3rd party Debian repos, check out the maintainers, as their security isn’t necessarily on par with the official repo.
…And I can help but think that tons of users do this on Debian/Fedora for non FOSS packages, like Nvidia drivers, certain parts of ffmpeg and such.