A group of Israeli researchers explored the security of the Visual Studio Code marketplace and managed to "infect" over 100 organizations by trojanizing a copy of the popular 'Dracula Official theme to include risky code. Further research into the VSCode Marketplace found thousands of extensions with millions of installs.
Except their summary is wrong. The researchers went on to search other extensions for known malicious code, and found it in thousands of extensions with tens of millions of total installs.
I hopped people here would notice that their “malicious code” detection is totally bogus when the malicious code highlighted hit a local IP address.
Good point. That was in the “static IP” category and not counted in the 200+ million install “malicious code” category, though. It could be a warning sign of false positives, but the example was such a small snippet it could also be opening after a VPN is established. That example was supposedly part of code that opens a connection for shell access from the other end, but without more details it’s not really possible to say.
Tons of devtools summons cmd.exe and do networks. Their claim is that more than 10% of the vscode marketplate is malicious package (i just divided the number of extensions they says is malicious, by the number of extensions)