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Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a cyber attack in which unknown threat actors deployed an open-source endpoint monitoring and digital forensic tool called Velociraptor , illustrating ongoing abuse of legitimate software for malicious purposes. "In this incident, the threat actor used the tool to download and execute Visual Studio Code with the likely intention of creating a tunnel to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server," the Sophos Counter Threat Unit Research Team said in a report published this week.  While threat actors are known to adopt living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques or take advantage of legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools in their attacks, the use of Velociraptor signals a tactical evolution, where incident response programs are being used to obtain a foothold and minimize the need for having to deploy their own malware.  Further analysis of the incident has revealed that the attackers used the Wind...

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...

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...

You won't believe your eyes while reading this, but this is true. Microsoft just joined the Linux Foundation as a high-paying Platinum member. Microsoft's love with open source community is embracing as time passes. At its first Connect event in 2013, the company launched Visual Studio 2013. A year later, Microsoft open sourced .NET, and last year, it open sourced the Visual Studio Code Editor, as well. Not just that, Microsoft partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu on Windows 10 , worked with FreeBSD to develop a Virtual Machine image for its Azure cloud , and chosen Ubuntu as the OS for its Cloud-based Big Data services. And the big news for this year is… At its 2016 Connect developer event in New York today, Microsoft announced that the company is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member – the highest level of membership, which costs $500,000 annually. Besides this, Microsoft also announced that tech giant Google has also joined on with the indepen...

Severe security flaws uncovered in popular Visual Studio Code extensions could enable attackers to compromise local machines as well as build and deployment systems through a developer's integrated development environment (IDE). The vulnerable extensions could be exploited to run arbitrary code on a developer's system remotely, in what could ultimately pave the way for supply chain attacks. Some of the extensions in question are "LaTeX Workshop," "Rainbow Fart," "Open in Default Browser," and "Instant Markdown," all of which have cumulatively racked up about two million installations between them. "Developer machines usually hold significant credentials, allowing them (directly or indirectly) to interact with many parts of the product," researchers from open-source security platform Snyk  said  in a deep-dive published on May 26. "Leaking a developer's private key can allow a malicious stakeholder to clone important...

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...

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 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 uncovered critical remote code execution vulnerabilities impacting major artificial intelligence (AI) inference engines, including those from Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, and open-source PyTorch projects such as vLLM and SGLang. "These vulnerabilities all traced back to the same root cause: the overlooked unsafe use of ZeroMQ (ZMQ) and Python's pickle deserialization," Oligo Security researcher Avi Lumelsky said in a report published Thursday. At its core, the issue stems from what has been described as a pattern called ShadowMQ , in which the insecure deserialization logic has propagated to several projects as a result of code reuse. The root cause is a vulnerability in Meta's Llama large language model (LLM) framework ( CVE-2024-50050 , CVSS score: 6.3/9.3) that was patched by the company last October. Specifically, it involved the use of ZeroMQ's recv_pyobj() method to deserialize incoming data using Python's pickle module. ...

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....

Great news for hackers. Now you can download and install Kali Linux directly from the Microsoft App Store on Windows 10 just like any other application. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true! Kali Linux, a very popular, free, and open-source Linux-based operating system widely used for hacking and penetration testing, is now natively available on Windows 10, without requiring dual boot or virtualization. Kali Linux is the latest Linux distribution to be made available on the Windows App Store for one-click installation, joining the list of other popular distribution such as Ubuntu , OpenSUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux . In Windows 10, Microsoft has provided a feature called " Windows Subsystem for Linux " (WSL) that allows users to run Linux applications directly on Windows. "For the past few weeks, we've been working with the Microsoft WSL team to get Kali Linux introduced into the Microsoft App Store as an official WSL distribution, and today we...

Microsoft has been expressing its love for Linux and Open Source for almost three years now, and this love is embracing as time passes. Just last year, Microsoft made headlines by building support for the Bash shell and Ubuntu Linux binaries into Windows 10, allowing users to run limited instances of Linux directly on top of the OS without installing any virtual machine, as well as developers to run command-line tools while building apps. Now, Microsoft has announced at its Build developer conference in Seattle that three different flavors of the free Linux operating system are coming to the company's app store, so its users can run Windows and Linux apps side-by-side. Yes, it's no joke. Three versions of Linux distributions – Ubuntu, Fedora, and SUSE – are coming to the Windows Store. Now, you'll soon be able to install these Linux operating systems on your Windows device just like any other app. While Ubuntu is already available on the Windows Store for a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical unpatched vulnerability affecting Pling-based free and open-source software (FOSS) marketplaces for Linux platform that could be potentially abused to stage supply-chain attacks and achieve remote code execution (RCE). "Linux marketplaces that are based on the Pling platform are vulnerable to a wormable [cross-site scripting] with potential for a supply-chain attack," Positive Security co-founder Fabian Bräunlein  said  in a technical write-up published today. "The native PlingStore application is affected by an RCE vulnerability, which can be triggered from any website while the app is running." The Pling-based app stores impacted by the flaw include — appimagehub.com store.kde.org gnome-look.org xfce-look.org pling.com PlingStore allows users to search and install Linux software, themes, icons, and other add-ons that may not be available for download through the distribution's software center.  T...

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 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...