Open VSX | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malicious extension in the Open VSX registry that harbors a remote access trojan called SleepyDuck . According to Secure Annex's John Tuckner, the extension in question, juan-bianco.solidity-vlang (version 0.0.7), was first published on October 31, 2025, as a completely benign library that was subsequently updated to version 0.0.8 on November 1 to include new malicious capabilities after reaching 14,000 downloads. "The malware includes sandbox evasion techniques and utilizes an Ethereum contract to update its command and control address in case the original address is taken down," Tuckner added . Campaigns distributing rogue extensions targeting Solidity developers have been repeatedly detected across both the Visual Studio Extension Marketplace and Open VSX. In July 2025, Kaspersky disclosed that a Russian developer lost $500,000 in cryptocurrency assets after installing one such extension through Cursor. In the latest...

New research has uncovered that publishers of over 100 Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions leaked access tokens that could be exploited by bad actors to update the extensions, posing a critical software supply chain risk. "A leaked VS Code Marketplace or Open VSX PAT [personal access token] allows an attacker to directly distribute a malicious extension update across the entire install base," Wiz security researcher Rami McCarthy said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "An attacker who discovered this issue would have been able to directly distribute malware to the cumulative 150,000 install base." The cloud security firm noted in many cases publishers failed to account for the fact that VS Code extensions, while distributed as .vsix files, can be unzipped and inspected, exposing hard-coded secrets embedded into them. In all, Wiz said it found over 550 validated secrets, distributed across more than 500 extensions from hundreds of distinct publishers....

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical vulnerability in the Open VSX Registry ("open-vsx[.]org") that, if successfully exploited, could have enabled attackers to take control of the entire Visual Studio Code extensions marketplace, posing a severe supply chain risk. "This vulnerability provides attackers full control over the entire extensions marketplace, and in turn, full control over millions of developer machines," Koi Security researcher Oren Yomtov said . "By exploiting a CI issue a malicious actor could publish malicious updates to every extension on Open VSX." Following responsible disclosure on May 4, 2025, multiple rounds of fixes were proposed by the maintainers, before a final patch was deployed on June 25. Open VSX Registry is an open-source project and alternative to the Visual Studio Marketplace. It's maintained by the Eclipse Foundation. Several code editors like Cursor, Windsurf, Google Cloud Shell Editor, Gitpod, an...