Software Integrity | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google has announced the launch of a new initiative called OSS Rebuild to bolster the security of the open-source package ecosystems and prevent software supply chain attacks. "As supply chain attacks continue to target widely-used dependencies, OSS Rebuild gives security teams powerful data to avoid compromise without burden on upstream maintainers," Matthew Suozzo, Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), said in a blog post this week. The project aims to provide build provenance for packages across the Python Package Index (Python), npm (JS/TS), and Crates.io (Rust) package registries, with plans to extend it to other open-source software development platforms. With OSS Rebuild, the idea is to leverage a combination of declarative build definitions, build instrumentation, and network monitoring capabilities to produce trustworthy security metadata, which can then be used to validate the package's origin and ensure it has not been tampered with. "Through a...

A new study of integrated development environments (IDEs) like Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, and Cursor has revealed weaknesses in how they handle the extension verification process, ultimately enabling attackers to execute malicious code on developer machines. "We discovered that flawed verification checks in Visual Studio Code allow publishers to add functionality to extensions while maintaining the verified icon," OX Security researchers Nir Zadok and Moshe Siman Tov Bustan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This results in the potential for malicious extensions to appear verified and approved, creating a false sense of trust." Specifically, the analysis found that Visual Studio Code sends an HTTP POST request to the domain "marketplace.visualstudio[.]com" to determine if an extension is verified or otherwise. The exploitation method essentially involves creating a malicious extension with the same verifia...