Mastodon Feed: Post

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
sodiboo@gaysex.cloud ("sodiboo :pride_heart:") wrote:

MANY ORPHANED AUR PACKAGES ARE BEING TARGETED WITH AN INFOSTEALER.

the Arch User Repository package alvr has been orphaned, then adopted by a threat actor who immediately updated it with an infostealer. If you have this package on your system and updated it recently, you've been compromised. This is not a result of any upstream compromise; it's just that one AUR package. in particular, the alvr-bin sister package seems to be fine.

here's the relevant thread for alvr from the Arch Linux mailing list. alvr seems to be the first package compromised and/or the first one that was noticed. it was updated maliciously at 2026-06-11 13:53:45 UTC (2026-06-11T13:53:45.000Z) and reverted approximately 3-4 hours after that.

SEVERAL OTHER PACKAGES ARE BEING TARGETED WITH THE SAME MALWARE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

AUR mailing list megathread <-- over 400 (!!!!) packages have the malicious npm dependency

they all share in common that they will install the atomic-lockfile package from NPM (so, here's a live link to the actual malware. do not install that). they were all orphan takeovers. as far as i can tell, all of the ones i linked have been reverted to known safe versions. including alvr.

this is an infostealer, meaning it exfiltrates sensitive data from your system such as login credentials. removing the malware will not undo the damage. moreover, uninstalling the malicious package will not remove the malware because it persists as a systemd service that stays on your system indefinitely.

it executes as an npm preinstall script, and the npm package is installed by the AUR packages. this means that simply installing the malicious versions of any of these packages will compromise you. it does not require you to do anything more afterwards. again, the malware persists if you uninstall the malicious packages

to check if you've been compromised, look in /etc/systemd/system and ~/.config/systemd/user for a recently added .service file with a random name. that's the persistence mechanism and the most obvious mark that you've been compromised.

---

Attached is a screenshot of an announcement from the "Linux VR Adventures" discord.

i know we all hate discord, but LVRA has a lot of auxiliary discussion, so here's an invite link

of special interest, here's a malware analysis thread. Feel free to follow it in real time, or contribute, or whatever. Whanos has produced a preliminary analysis blog post that contains a lot of important information about the malware.

post by Skull, about 10 minutes before this post on fedi. @everyone Unfortunate announce. It appears the alvr package on the AUR has been orphaned and has fallen victim to an infostealer malware attack. If you have this installed on any machine it is advised that you disconnect it from networking and attempt to invalidate or rotate any keys or passwords on the box that may have been shipped back to homebase. ALVR itself and the alvr-bin package appear safe for distribution, but specific to Arch Linux and other distros like endeavor and cachyOS, the from source ALVR package named exactly alvr has been compromised. If you would like to help dissect any of the malware you may report to the #alvr channel to assist so we can understand the scope of the damage. Again, the ALVR project itself is fine and this is strictly limited to Arch based consumers of the AUR package, never forget there's dangers to the AUR.