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.
  • towerful@programming.dev
    0·
    9 months ago

    What makes this even more sneaky is that JetBrains has a theme called “Darcula”.

    So, with a wider generic theme called Dracula and themes that duplicate JetBrains Darcula theme, it is no surprise that “Darcula Official” is being installed.
    It’s more than just a typosquat

    Edit:
    But why can a theme make web requests?!

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      9 months ago

      But why can a theme make web requests?!

      Because we live in a broken world and nothing matters.

      On a more serious note, it’s a pretty horrifying misfeature. What’s even more worrying is that by all appearances Microsoft doesn’t give a shit, if they apparently didn’t even bother removing the malicious extensions that were reported. Not that I’m surprised, but still.