The AUR really has been known to be low-hanging fruit for bad actors, which makes it somewhat surprising it took this long for it to be taken advantage of.

I have many opinions regarding this situation, but it mostly doesn't matter. AUR staff and AUR helper developers will figure out what they want to do, hopefully they will find a good approach.

But what I personally take away from this is simply that it has become worth it to target desktop Linux with malware. Or at least, moreso than previously. It is perhaps a good sign in some ways that the desktop is starting to be taken more seriously.

The bad news, of course, is that the Linux desktop is a bit of a train wreck in terms of security hygeine. It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world, and I fully expect we'll also see more malware propagated through KDE's New Stuff integration (which goes through Pling.)

  > It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world,

I'm not sure if it is that the desktop is being taken more seriously, or that its easier to write code that works on many distributions and configurations, greatly reducing the cost and increasing the value of the existing 'market'.

I would say that it is now very easy to steal 'AI' providers credentials this way. And then you can use them to write more malware or scam or use models for generating speech to call people and get them to 'redeem'. Or at leat to me this seems more sensible than injecting just malware.