That means it was very hard to detect (I certainly do not check all AUR dependencies) and it ran silently during the install phase. The incident was a good opportunity to have a closer look at my own setup.

Welcome back to the Linux CLI tools series. Today’s focus is on awk, a versatile text-processing tool, and how to use it to filter out events from a calendar file. This had a specific use case for me, because I wanted to filter out all events from an exported .ics file before a certain date. I needed to import the filtered events to a new calendar and want to avoid duplicating events. So, my main goal: Delete all calendar events before April 1, 2025, from a .ics file, using just the command line.

As we’ve already hinted at, Burp Suite is a sort of Dev Tools on steroids. It’s a suite of web app tools that intercepts traffic and lets you inspect it, modify it, and even automate your testing.

But you don’t need to be a professional or have a ton of add-ons to get value from it. Being able to easily see and modify requests, and automate/create new requests will be a big help to you as a newbie, too.

Recently a malicious AUR package used a npm dependency (atomic-lockfile) to compromise systems. What was insidious about the attack was that it was more indirect than installing a simple backdoor: the PKGBUILD looked clean, instead the payload was in a transitive npm dependency.

That means it was very hard to detect (I certainly do not check all AUR dependencies) and it ran silently during the install phase. The incident was a good opportunity to have a closer look at my own setup.