ICT Security-Sécurité PC et Internet

Another day, another Linux community with malware woes.

Last time it was Gentoo, a hard-core, source-based Linux distribution that is popular with techies who like to spend hours tweaking their entire operating sytem and rebuilding all their software from scratch to wring a few percentage points of performance out of it.

That sort of thing isn’t for everyone, but it’s harmless fun and it does give you loads of insight into how everything fits together.

That sets it apart from distros such as ElementaryOS and Mint, which rival and even exceed Windows and macOS for ease of installation and use, but don’t leave you with much of a sense of how it all actually works.

This time, the malware poisoning happened to Arch Linux, another distro we’d characterise as hard-core, though very much more widely used than Gentoo.

Three downloadable software packages in the AUR, short for Arch User Respository, were found to have been rebuilt so they contained what you might (perhaps slightly unkindly) refer to as zombie downloader robot overlord malware.

Bots or zombies are malware programs that call home to fetch instructions from the crooks on what to do next.