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There is a known feature in KDE where you can install 3rd-party themes and extensions directly from the settings app for each KDE component. The “KDE Store” is a popular place where everyone can upload global themes, Qt themes, icon themes, color themes and other eye-candy themes for the KDE desktop.
However, the news today is that a user has suffered a complete data loss after installing a global KDE 6 theme that removed everything on his disk partitions.
The theme is called “Grey Layout” and has been removed from the KDE Store after the incident. The KDE team reports that the issue apparently happened because of a misconfiguration/error in the theme script, and not because of an intentional malicious act.
KDE global themes, when installed from the KDE Store, can apparently run Bash shell scripts, which in turn can effect the user’s entire system.
In any case, the poor user published posts [1][2] on Reddit to report how he completely lost his data across all his disk drives after he installed the theme via the KDE Store.
The KDE Store does give a short warning that the content on it is not audited by the KDE team. However, it fails short to explain that such incidents can happen, so people might assume the worst that can happen is installing a broken theme:
So if you are a KDE user, you should pay attention next time to these themes and addons that you install from KDE Store. They could wipe your disk drives if they are misconfigured or written poorly.
Perhaps KDE developers need to work further on this to see how to prevent such situations from happening in the future.