Trouble In The AUR: The 2026 Malicious Packages Incident & What It Means

In June of 2026, Arch Linux experienced a real hurdle: a large number of packages were taken over and turned evil. Orphaned packages (as of writing, 1,935 known packages; roughly 1.8% of the AUR) were hijacked by bad actors and loaded with malware. If you use the AUR and have done a system update in the last week, it's highly recommended that you check to see if your system has any of the infected…