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VSCode extensions with 9 million installs pulled over security risks (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

'Material Theme – Free' and 'Material Theme Icons – Free,'

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

"We just had an outdated sanity.io dependency used since 2016 to show release notes from sanity headless CMS, that was the only issue they found."

"That dependency has been there since 2016 and passed every check since then, now it looks compromised but NO ONE from Microsoft reached us to remove it. They just pulled down everything causing issues to millions of users, and causing a loop in vscode (yep, it's their fault)"

If the dependency has been compromised then extensions that use that dependency and ship compromised code are also compromised. Its a transitive property if it ships bad code.

With that in mind Microsoft yoinking the extension from the market place and user devices seems reasonable. But what was the "loop" they mention?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

But what was the “loop” they mention?

The linked issue comment has the info about it

Letting you know that VSCode is unable to uninstall the extension. It prompts me to uninstall, but when I confirm the window refreshes and the extension is still there, triggering the same "is problematic" prompt. This is an infinite loop. Same behavior when trying to uninstall the usual way from the extensions panel.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

Well that's not ideal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Breaking: software with "free" in the name turns out to be malicious

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Thank you :)