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A new attack vector targeting the Visual Studio Code extensions marketplace could be leveraged to upload rogue extensions masquerading as their legitimate counterparts with the goal of mounting supply chain attacks. The technique "could act as an entry point for an attack on many organizations," Aqua security researcher Ilay Goldman  said  in a report published last week. VS Code extensions, curated via a  marketplace  made available by Microsoft, allow developers to add programming languages, debuggers, and tools to the VS Code source-code editor to augment their workflows.  "All extensions run with the privileges of the user that has opened the VS Code without any sandbox," Goldman said, explaining the potential risks of using VS Code extensions. "This means that the extension can install any program on your computer including ransomwares, wipers, and more." To that end, Aqua found that not only is it possible for a threat actor to impersonate a po...

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...

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 flagged yet another evolution of the ongoing GlassWorm campaign, which employs a new Zig dropper that's designed to stealthily infect all integrated development environments (IDEs) on a developer's machine. The technique has been discovered in an Open VSX extension named " specstudio.code-wakatime-activity-tracker ," which masquerades as WakaTime, a popular tool that measures the time programmers spend inside their IDE. The extension is no longer available for download. "The extension [...] ships a Zig-compiled native binary alongside its JavaScript code," Aikido Security researcher Ilyas Makari said in an analysis published this week. "This is not the first time GlassWorm has resorted to using native compiled code in extensions. However, rather than using the binary as the payload directly, it is used as a stealthy indirection for the known GlassWorm dropper, which now secretly infects all other I...

GitHub on Wednesday officially confirmed that the breach of its internal repositories was the result of a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned version of the Nx Console Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension.  The development comes as the Nx team revealed that the extension, nrwl.angular-console , was breached after one of its developers' systems was hacked in the wake of the recent TanStack supply chain attack. Other companies that were impacted by the TanStack compromise include OpenAI, Mistral AI , and Grafana Labs . "We have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub's internal repositories, such as our customer's own enterprises, organizations, and repositories," Alexis Wales, Chief Information Security Officer of GitHub, said in a statement. "Some of GitHub's internal repositories contain information from customers, for example, excerpts of support interactions. If any impact is discov...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new iteration of the GlassWorm campaign that they say represents a "significant escalation" in how it propagates through the Open VSX registry. "Instead of requiring every malicious listing to embed the loader directly, the threat actor is now abusing extensionPack and extensionDependencies to turn initially standalone-looking extensions into transitive delivery vehicles in later updates, allowing a benign-appearing package to begin pulling a separate GlassWorm-linked extension only after trust has already been established," Socket said in a report published Friday. The software supply chain security company said it discovered at least 72 additional malicious Open VSX extensions since January 31, 2026, targeting developers. These extensions mimic widely used developer utilities, including linters and formatters, code runners, and tools for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistants like Clade Code and Google...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a supply chain attack targeting a Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension called Ethcode that has been installed a little over 6,000 times. The compromise, per ReversingLabs , occurred via a GitHub pull request that was opened by a user named Airez299 on June 17, 2025. First released by 7finney in 2022, Ethcode is a VS Code extension that's used to deploy and execute solidity smart contracts in Ethereum Virtual Machine ( EVM )-based blockchains. An EVM is a decentralized computation engine that's designed to run smart contracts on the Ethereum network. According to the supply chain security company, the GitHub project received its last non-malicious update on September 6, 2024. That changed last month when Airez299 opened a pull request with the message "Modernize codebase with viem integration and testing framework." The user claimed to have added a new testing framework with Mocha integration and contract testin...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension for Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) on the official Extension Marketplace that claims to be a free artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, but stealthily drops a malicious payload on compromised hosts. The extension, named "ClawdBot Agent - AI Coding Assistant" ("clawdbot.clawdbot-agent"), has since been taken down by Microsoft. It was published by a user named "clawdbot" on January 27, 2026.  Moltbot has taken off in a big way, crossing more than 85,000 stars on GitHub as of writing. The open-source project, created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, allows users to run a personal AI assistant powered by a large language model (LLM) locally on their own devices and interact with it over already established communication platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and WebChat.

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension with basic ransomware capabilities that appears to be created with the help of artificial intelligence – in other words, vibe-coded. Secure Annex researcher John Tuckner, who flagged the extension " susvsex ," said it does not attempt to hide its malicious functionality. The extension was uploaded on November 5, 2025, by a user named "suspublisher18" along with the description "Just testing" and the email address "donotsupport@example[.]com." "Automatically zips, uploads, and encrypts files from C:\Users\Public\testing (Windows) or /tmp/testing (macOS) on first launch," reads the description of the extension. As of November 6, Microsoft has stepped in to remove it from the official VS Code Extension Marketplace.  According to details shared by "suspublisher18," the extension is designed to automatically activate itself on any even...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a loophole in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace that allows threat actors to reuse names of previously removed extensions. Software supply chain security outfit ReversingLabs said it made the discovery after it identified a malicious extension named "ahbanC.shiba" that functioned similarly to two other extensions – ahban.shiba and ahban.cychelloworld – that were flagged earlier this March. All three libraries are designed to act as a downloader to retrieve a PowerShell payload from an external server that encrypts files in a folder called "testShiba" on the victim's Windows desktop and demands a Shiba Inu token by instructing the victim to deposit the assets to an unspecified wallet. These efforts suggest ongoing development attempts by the threat actor. The company said it decided to dig deeper because of the fact that the name of the new extension ("ahbanC.shiba") was virtually the same as one of the t...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a compromised version of the Nx Console extension that was published to the Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Marketplace. The extension in question is rwl.angular-console (version 18.95.0), a popular user interface and plugin for code editors like VS Code, Cursor, and JetBrains. The VS Code extension has more than 2.2 million installations. "Within seconds of a developer opening any workspace, the compromised extension silently fetched and executed a 498 KB obfuscated payload from a dangling orphan commit hidden inside the official nrwl/nx GitHub repository," StepSecurity researcher Ashish Kurmi said . The payload is a "multi-stage credential stealer and supply chain poisoning tool" that harvests developer secrets and exfiltrates them via HTTPS, the GitHub API, and DNS tunneling. It also installs a Python backdoor on macOS systems that abuses the GitHub Search API as a dead drop resolver for receiving further comm...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched bug impacting Open VSX's pre-publish scanning pipeline to cause the tool to allow a malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension to pass the vetting process and go live in the registry. "The pipeline had a single boolean return value that meant both 'no scanners are configured' and 'all scanners failed to run,'" Koi Security researcher Oran Simhony said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The caller couldn't tell the difference. So when scanners failed under load, Open VSX treated it as 'nothing to scan for' and waved the extension right through." Early last month, the Eclipse Foundation, which maintains Open VSX, announced plans to enforce pre-publish security checks before VS Code extensions are published to the repository in an attempt to tackle the growing problem of malicious extensions. With Open VSX also serving as the extension market...

Popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) forks such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae have been found to recommend extensions that are non-existent in the Open VSX registry, potentially opening the door to supply chain risks when bad actors publish malicious packages under those names. The problem, according to Koi , is that these integrated development environments (IDEs) inherit the list of officially recommended extensions from Microsoft's extensions marketplace. These extensions don't exist in Open VSX. The VS Code extension recommendations can take two different forms: file-based, which are displayed as toast notifications when users open a file in specific formats, or software-based, which are suggested when certain programs are already installed on the host. "The problem: these recommended extensions didn't exist on Open VSX," Koi security researcher Oren Yomtov said. "The namespaces were u...

The supply chain campaign known as GlassWorm has once again reared its head, infiltrating both Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX with 24 extensions impersonating popular developer tools and frameworks like Flutter, React, Tailwind, Vim, and Vue. GlassWorm was first documented in October 2025, detailing its use of the Solana blockchain for command-and-control (C2) and harvest npm, Open VSX, GitHub, and Git credentials, drain cryptocurrency assets from dozens of wallets, and turn developer machines into attacker-controlled nodes for other criminal activities. The most crucial aspect of the campaign is the abuse of the stolen credentials to compromise additional packages and extensions, thereby spreading the malware like a worm. Despite continued efforts of Microsoft and Open VSX, the malware resurfaced a second time last month, and the attackers were observed targeting GitHub repositories. The latest wave of the GlassWorm campaign, spotted by Secure Annex's Jo...

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...

As many as 60 malicious npm packages have been discovered in the package registry with malicious functionality to harvest hostnames, IP addresses, DNS servers, and user directories to a Discord-controlled endpoint. The packages, published under three different accounts, come with an install‑time script that's triggered during npm install, Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report published last week. The libraries have been collectively downloaded over 3,000 times. "The script targets Windows, macOS, or Linux systems, and includes basic sandbox‑evasion checks, making every infected workstation or continuous‑integration node a potential source of valuable reconnaissance," the software supply chain security firm said . The names of the three accounts, each of which published 20 packages within an 11-day time period, are listed below. The accounts no longer exist on npm - bbbb335656 cdsfdfafd1232436437, and  sdsds656565 The malicious code, per So...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new set of three extensions associated with the GlassWorm campaign, indicating continued attempts on part of threat actors to target the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) ecosystem. The extensions in question , which are still available for download, are listed below - ai-driven-dev.ai-driven-dev (3,402 downloads) adhamu.history-in-sublime-merge (4,057 downloads) yasuyuky.transient-emacs (2,431 downloads) GlassWorm, first documented by Koi Security late last month, refers to a campaign in which threat actors leverage VS Code extensions on the Open VSX Registry and the Microsoft Extension Marketplace to harvest Open VSX, GitHub, and Git credentials, drain funds from 49 different cryptocurrency wallet extensions, and drop additional tools for remote access. What makes the malware notable is that it uses invisible Unicode characters to hide malicious code in code editors and abuses the pilfered credentials to compromise additional extens...