alt Hacker NewsAnnouncements like this typically contain information that will help users identify if they were compromised, such as the name of files that are dropped or modified when the malware is initialized, startup entry names, etc. Obviously the person with remote access can get in and manually start doing things on individual machines, but that doesn't mean there aren't indicators present from the programmatic actions the malware took before that point or on machines that weren't manually accessed.
Replies
In addition to the point about "not being expected to do a full malware analysis"...
Assuming the malware doesn't clean up after itself, `pacman -Q firefox-patch-bin librewolf-fix-bin zen-browser-patched-bin` would tell you if they are installed... but if it did clean up after itself... how are the maintainers supposed to know what steps were taken to clean up given that it's a rat that could be running different steps on different computers...
Expecting a complete malware analysis from maintainers is a tad too much. Their goal is to notify users as soon as possible, even if no other information about the malware is available.
Also, an attacker may leave no traces by simply dumping the payload to /tmp.