cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13397700
Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data
Or is it just buggy?
For those that don’t want to go back to the Dark side (Reddit), the post referenced a theme (Grey Layout global theme) which got KDE Dev’s involved who in reaction removed the listing from the store.
In short - the theme ran code to run a rm -rf on the user’s drive which wiped everything during install. Aside from backing up your data religiously, be sure to inspect the code instead of blindly installing for now. KDE Dev’s said they will need to do better so I expect some changes are afoot to provide better security.
Great time to mention tools like testdisk that can easily recover data that has been recently deleted on common filesystems.
I would use gparted
Edit: it can only restore deleted partitions, not files. For restoring files check the documentation for your file system
A ton of extensions are executing scripts, but this is generally behind a warning.
This REALLY has to change guys, and for that the getnewstuff backend must become better.
For example Dolphin extensions are still downloaded to some random download location that is not actually used.
And the packaging of addons is extremely random too.
*Malicious script inside everywhere can wipe out all your data
Seems like a ~~blessing ~~ glaring kde bug, I mean how is it possible? Why a theme needs to be able to execute shell commands?
It’s really not uncommon for a lot of themes to package an installer script, in case they have multiple versions, or multiple colors bundled. Realistically, they should just each have their own store page, but it’s a colossal pain in the ass. The Catppuccin global theme, for example, has 16 color variants, 2 decoration variants each, and then also a version with no splash. The whitesur theme is similar.
I do agree though that if this is going to continue to exist, it should not have permissions it has today
