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Malicious VSCode extensions with millions of installs discovered (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 5 months ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/programming@beehaw.org

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[–] Pekka@feddit.nl 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That headline is quite misleading ... the malicious extension only had a few hundred installs, not millions. They just copied an existing extension that does have 7 millions installs. They did went quite far by registering a URL. Of course it is bad that stuff like this manages to get on the store, but as long as you check what you are installing, you should be fine.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not quite. Their "malicious" extension only got a few hundred installs. Using the data gathered by that extension and via other means they were able to locate other actually malicious extensions. Those total in the millions of installations.

Through this process, they have found the following:

1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
1,452 running unknown executables.
2,304 that are using another publisher's Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.

[–] Pekka@feddit.nl 1 points 5 months ago

Ah it makes more sense that way, I didn't read the title as if they were talking about all the extensions that they found summed together. This does make it really clear that you should always check extensions when installing them, and not just install extensions with a low install base from an unknown author.