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.
  • Kuinox@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Fake news headline. There is no virus installed on millions of computer.
    An extension typosquatting an extension with million of install managed to be installed a few hundred of times.

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      5 months ago

      I believe they’re referring to lower down in the article, where the researchers analyzed existing extensions on the marketplace:

      After the successful experiment, the researchers decided to dive into the threat landscape of the VSCode Marketplace, using a custom tool they developed named ‘ExtensionTotal’ to find high-risk extensions, unpack them, and scrutinize suspicious code snippets.

      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.