Visual Studio Code | 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...

Eclipse Foundation, which maintains the open-source Open VSX project, said it has taken steps to revoke a small number of tokens that were leaked within Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions published in the marketplace. The action comes following a report from cloud security company Wiz earlier this month, which found several extensions from both Microsoft's VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX to have inadvertently exposed their access tokens within public repositories, potentially allowing bad actors to seize control and distribute malware, effectively poisoning the extension supply chain. "Upon investigation, we confirmed that a small number of tokens had been leaked and could potentially be abused to publish or modify extensions," Mikaël Barbero, head of security at the Eclipse Foundation, said in a statement. "These exposures were caused by developer mistakes, not a compromise of the Open VSX infrastructure." Open VSX said it has also introduced a toke...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a self-propagating worm that spreads via Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions on the Open VSX Registry and the Microsoft Extension Marketplace, underscoring how developers have become a prime target for attacks. The sophisticated threat, codenamed GlassWorm by Koi Security, is the second such supply chain attack to hit the DevOps space within a span of a month after the Shai-Hulud worm that targeted the npm ecosystem in mid-September 2025. What makes the attack stand out is the use of the Solana blockchain for command-and-control (C2), making the infrastructure resilient to takedown efforts. It also uses Google Calendar as a C2 fallback mechanism. Another novel aspect is that the GlassWorm campaign relies on "invisible Unicode characters that make malicious code literally disappear from code editors," Idan Dardikman said in a technical report. "The attacker used Unicode variation selectors – special characters that are...

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....

A China-aligned threat actor known as TA415 has been attributed to spear-phishing campaigns targeting the U.S. government, think tanks, and academic organizations utilizing U.S.-China economic-themed lures. "In this activity, the group masqueraded as the current Chair of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as the U.S.-China Business Council, to target a range of individuals and organizations predominantly focused on U.S.-China relations, trade, and economic policy," Proofpoint said in an analysis. The enterprise security company said the activity, observed throughout July and August 2025, is likely an effort on part of Chinese state-sponsored threat actors to facilitate intelligence gathering amid ongoing U.S.-China trade talks, adding the hacking group shares overlaps with a threat cluster tracked broadly under the names APT41 and Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium). The findings come days...

In what's the latest instance of a software supply chain attack, unknown threat actors managed to compromise Toptal's GitHub organization account and leveraged that access to publish 10 malicious packages to the npm registry. The packages contained code to exfiltrate GitHub authentication tokens and destroy victim systems, Socket said in a report published last week. In addition, 73 repositories associated with the organization were made public. The list of affected packages is below - @toptal/picasso-tailwind @toptal/picasso-charts @toptal/picasso-shared @toptal/picasso-provider @toptal/picasso-select @toptal/picasso-quote @toptal/picasso-forms @xene/core @toptal/picasso-utils @toptal/picasso-typograph All the Node.js libraries were embedded with identical payloads in their package.json files, attracting a total of about 5,000 downloads before they were removed from the repository. The nefarious code has been found to specifically target the preinstall and p...

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...