The Arch Linux team has once again been forced to respond to a distributed denial-of-service attack targeting its AUR repository infrastructure. As a result, DDoS protection has been enabled for aur.archlinux.org to help mitigate the ongoing disruption.
While this measure helps keep the AUR website accessible, it has introduced a significant side effect: pushing to the AUR is currently not possible.
But… why? I mean, who’s targeting Arch? Sounds like the Arch team has some info that they won’t release (for now), but this is so confusing to me…
Nobody has been claiming responsibility. Some of the AUR forum peoples think it’s butthurt malware devs who got caught uploading malware, but it’s just a shot in the dark.
https://status.archlinux.org/
Been on and off for months now.
If it’s blocking AUR updates, it could be an attempt to keep some patches to certain exploits from going out? But it seems unlikely that the cost of a ddos is worth the tiny number of possibly vulnerable AUR users out there…
If people just used Hannah Montana Linux then we wouldn’t have these problems.
I wonder if it could be a state actor? I can imagine that the powers that be in MANY countries could be motivated to keep users away from operating system software that isn’t spyware.
Then why go against the AUR and not the official mirrors? The former isn’t always exactly the epitome of securely packaged trusted applications
Just spitballing, because honestly the amount of effort that must go into sustaining this attack in the long term just baffles me. Like, why?
It costs, like $10 to rent a botnet for a couple-hour attack.
Services I know that have both HTTPS and SSH access have seen all sorts of weird stuff seemingly related to LLM bot scraping over the past few months. Enough to bring down some git servers.