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Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace

867 points1 dayphorion.io
felixrieseberg • 17 hours ago

Felix from Anthropic here.

We’re working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn’t a compromise of Anthropic’s systems or employee laptops. A malicious actor used access to Cursor’s marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn’t build or publish. The versions on our official channels are not affected and this only impacts Cursor users.

tzone • 11 hours ago

You can say that this isn't compromise of Anthropic, but it sort of is in the setup. Cursor Claude extension is marked as something made by Anthropic, so default assumption is that only people who can release that new extension would be a team at Anthropic.

Since that is clearly not the case, that is just as much Anthropic's problem as it is Cursor's problem. There either needs to be a technical change so that extensions are signed with keys that Anthropic controls, or you should take the branding off from the Cursor extensions.

ghshephard • 8 hours ago

I was working on the clearly mistaken impression that "Made by Anthropic" in the cursor store meant that the artifact had been signed by Anthropic. If that is not the case, then two party's need to get their act together:

  - Cursor needs to add signing if they want to claim something was "made" by another party.

  - Anthropic needs to stamp out any provider from using said, "Made by Anthropic" until they start adding signing to their process.   Trademark law is useful here.

Until that happens - it's almost like you have to delete any extension from the Cursor Store off of your Cursor instance - kind of a crapshoot what you are actually downloading, no?

For example - what guarantee do I have with something like: " This publisher has verified ownership of cursor.com" - when I'm looking at the WSL extension. Are there any guarantees it's not been replaced with some other extension?

AtNightWeCode • 8 hours ago

The core problem is that VScode extensions does not need to be signed at all. Mind boggling stupid design decision.

+1
Rohansi • 7 hours ago
+2
wombatpm • 3 hours ago
LooseMarmoset • 7 hours ago

i work for a large company that’s trying to curate vs code extensions, and this doesn’t make it easy.

we automatically block extensions and require that extensions must be approved, but this is a tedious process.

jimmby654 • 5 hours ago

You want an AI company to care about IP? And you aren't being sarcastic?

cmiles74 • 8 hours ago

Cursor should not be shipping extensions that are branded Anthropic if Anthropic didn’t create that extension. If that’s really what happened then that needs to change, ASAP. Now that it has happened, IMHO, it is partly an Anthropic problem: the malware has their branding and their name on it, I don’t think they can just brush that off.

Does Cursor have some process that just scrapes Microsoft’s extension catalog and lists them in their own? If that’s hostile works then it’s broken and needs to be fixed.

cmiles74 • 5 hours ago

I'm on my phone, "If that’s hostile works.." should be "If that’s how it works..."

telephone3 • 2 hours ago

I mean the initial translation kind of works too.

adriand • 8 hours ago

> Cursor should not be shipping extensions that are branded Anthropic if Anthropic didn’t create that extension.

Well, duh. From what I can tell, that’s literally the hack. A bad actor shipped an extension on the Cursor marketplace that wasn’t made by Anthropic.

+1
dboreham • 7 hours ago
darkwi11ow • 9 hours ago

The issue could be resolved by introducing some sort of signing for openvsx extension packages. Then regardless of from where one downloaded Claude, it can be always verified to be authentic or not. This technology exists for ages and prominently featured in all mainstream Linux distributions. Cursor, Anthropic and other openvsx users need to work with Eclipse Foundation to make this happen.

bg24 • 7 hours ago

Leading companies need to be proactive in reducing these surface areas. For example, if anyone can submit an agent skill, plugin, or MCP server with Anthropic or OpenAI's name into a marketplace, it is an attack vector.

consumer451 • 10 hours ago

Are you claiming that the Cursor extension store - marketplace.cursorapi.com - does not add their own proxy to Open VSX?

One thing at a time. Please just answer this one question. I am just some dude, and I would love to chat about this.

IshKebab • 10 hours ago

That's nonsense. If what felixrieseberg said is true this is very clearly a compromise of Cursor and not Anthropic. Trying to spin it as a compromise of Anthropic is absurd.

ethanzh • 10 hours ago

I don't think they're trying to spin this as Anthropic being compromised, but I do think they're correct in saying this is Anthropic's problem to deal with now, regardless of the fact that they're not responsible for the root cause.

+3
junofan • 10 hours ago
d0mine • 10 hours ago

If you decided to use an umbrella to protect something during a hurricane and umbrella breaks and your thing is ruined. Whose fault is that?

Distributing signed artifacts is a solved problem (until NP=P is cracked at least).

abofh • 10 hours ago

That is not what was written; what was described was anthropic losing control over their cursor account - perhaps a key compromise, developer laptop compromise, or a fault in cursor, but of the three, the language suggests the first two.

NewsaHackO • 8 hours ago

This is wrong.

tehlike • 10 hours ago

+1.

baxtr • 10 hours ago

HN has a dedicated upvote functionality.

theteapot • 10 hours ago

I think he's saying (erroneously) Anthropic owns Cursor. Reading this claude.com page [1] hawking Cursor you could be forgiven for forming that impression.

[1]: https://claude.com/marketplace/agents-products/cursor

AtNightWeCode • 10 hours ago

That is simply not how software works.

munk-a • 8 hours ago

From the producer's side, sure, we[1]'re all pretty sympathetic to the fact that if you publish a library a bunch of random people will build bridging libraries for languages that you have no control over.

But from the consumer's side it is very much an expectation and if you find yourself in the situation above it's on you to make it very clear that such extensions and third party tools are unofficial.

In this particular case I think it's fair to say that Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool.

1. We specifically being library and tool producers that are noticeably overrepresented on this forum.

no-name-here • 5 hours ago

> Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool

Had the tool been up longer than the 11 hours the malware was live? If not, then why would Anthropic try to get it marked as unofficial, as opposed to take it down?

Or are you saying that every author and publisher should request Cursor to mark their extensions on the Cursor vsx pass-through as unofficial?

+1
AtNightWeCode • 8 hours ago
ipsento606 • 17 hours ago

The situation is confusing, so can I please confirm the following:

* "Cursor Editor" is a fork of VS Code

* The "Claude Code for VS Code" extension, v2.1.313, was compromised specifically on the Cursor Editor extension marketplace / distribution system

* The "Claude Code for VS Code" extension for regular VS Code on the official VS Code extension marketplace was not affected

Followup question: was a v2.1.313 also published on the official VS Code marketplace? If so, your statement is that that version was not compromised?

ddworken • 17 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, that is correct: This only impacted the extension as it was hosted on the Cursor marketplace. It did not impact the official VS Code extension marketplace or OpenVSX. Users of Claude Code on VS Code are not impacted by this issue.

consumer451 • 15 hours ago

I am curious to see how difficult it will be to get this message across on Twitter. $44B seems like a bargain at this point.

bostik • 12 hours ago

This is not directed at you personally but Anthropic (and everyone around this debacle) in general: please put some real effort behind planned crisis communications. The reporting on this has been atrocious and the comms coming from Anthropic have not really helped.

FWIW: the decision to publish an overriding version bump across all lanes was the correct one. It simplifies comms and helps to answer the first question every affected party has: "but what does this mean to ME?" - much easier to deal with the flood when you can start by sending back "are you running, or have you ever installed version Y?"

Time for technically accurate nuance comes shortly after, and in this case it has been lacking. Yes, you are dealing with confusing mix of various extension marketplaces. Explaining that to a questioning audience who do not have the necessary background information is non-trivial. Kevin's blog is pretty well known, but in this case the real updates are only coming in via a separate Mastodon thread (itself polluted by uninformed commenters) so the real, tangible and understandable details have still been missing.

Claude and its surrounding ecosystem are a huge, high-value supply chain compromise target. Cursor's extension being compromised is not your fault but it is still your problem.

Disclosure: done enough security incident comms in high-stakes environments with extremely demanding clients, operating under various regulations.

troupo • 8 hours ago

> But Anthropic (and everyone around this debacle) in general: please put some real effort behind planned crisis communications. The reporting on this has been atrocious and the comms coming from Anthropic have not really helped.

Anthropic is incapable of communicating. They rely on random employees in random threads on random social media to do some kind of PR and posts. Regardless of the issue. Or even non-issues but features.

+1
trvz • 11 hours ago
+4
nitrix • 10 hours ago
wky • 17 hours ago

Even more confusing is apparently Cursor Marketplace is OpenVSX + their own proxy to add extensions on top[0], so there are at least two possible cases:

1. The compromised version was present on OpenVSX itself, and Cursor Marketplace proxied to it

2. The compromised version was on Cursor's proxy, not OpenVSX itself

[0] https://cursor.com/help/customization/extensions

gamer191 • 14 hours ago

It wasn't on OpenVSX according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305148

ruined • 15 hours ago

there is NO LEGIT v2.1.313

here is the ddworken comment confirming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300683#50305148

sarjann • 12 hours ago

My guess is someone published an extension on vscode/cursor claiming to be Anthropic when it wasn't. Kind of like me publishing an app called Youtube on the app store, being accepted by Apple and having people download my malicious app called Youtube.

chrisweekly • 12 hours ago

There's been too much guessing already. Anthropic employees answered in this thread almost 4h before your response.

jitbit • 15 hours ago

Ok, so... Summing this up

- Cursor (obviously) is not using MSFT vscode extensions library - Cursor (apparently) is not using Open-VSX either! - Cursor uses it's own "Cursor's marketplace" which is not public, no one knows what it is exactly, and looks like it is proxying open-vsx marketplace (?) - THAT "Cursor's markeplace" is what was compromised today.

So. I would really really love someone from Cusro's team to step in and explain WTF just happened! (pardong the language)

chunky1994 • 15 hours ago

Apparently it is public: https://cursor.com/help/customization/extensions

They use a proxy in front of OpenVSX…purportedly for better security, the irony writes itself.

jitbit • 12 hours ago

Ironically, that page has a paragraph "How Cursor reduces supply-chain risk:"

Which is exactly the opposite of what happened today.

drdrey • 8 hours ago

well maybe they did reduce supply chain risk, but still need to reduce it some more

bagacrap • 7 hours ago

> Team admins can defer extension installs and updates until a marketplace version has been published for a minimum number of hours.

I think everyone is going to be setting this to 168 after today.

Lazare • 11 hours ago

Yes. Cursor marketplace is a mirror of Open VSX except they inject some plugins that are not in Open VSX for some reason. This works because Open VSX has basically no security. Which was already an issue.

JeremyNT • 17 hours ago

If this isn't a damning indictment of Cursor, I don't know what is. Perhaps it will be the death knell.

What value is this VS fork actually adding given today's advanced harnesses? Surely whatever benefits it offers are not worth the risks going forward.

satellites • 13 hours ago

Cursor was the first AI coding tool I used that had a "wow" factor and got me to switch over from typing out most of my code to having AI write most of it. But then when I used Claude Code for the first time, I never went back to Cursor.

I can see the value in a world where you still want to be a bit more hands-on with your code, but that didn't feel worth paying for anymore. Now if I want to be hands-on I actually prefer a minimalist editor with no AI features at all, while agents run in my terminal.

lp92 • 4 hours ago

Yeah, kind of eye raising if people are still using Cursor now days.

Aboutplants • 17 hours ago

Seeing as SpaceX owns Curser, I’m surprised there wasn’t a hack on SpaceX… Yet

gpm • 16 hours ago

Who says there wasn't?

A lot of the most valuable SpaceX IP (at least to the big "advanced persistent threat" hackers) is probably related to military secrets, information to let you spy on/disable/control star shield/link, and so on. Not things we'd find out about as the general public.

simondotau • 6 hours ago

It's highly probable that Russia's top state-controlled hackers have been attempting to exploit/infiltrate SpaceX and Starlink for the past four years.

China has probably being doing so for a decade.

numbsafari • 16 hours ago

I mean, who says it wasn't an inside job...

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/30/binance-hack-elon-musk-tesla...

sunaookami • 17 hours ago

>Perhaps it will be the death knell

People said the same thing about SolarWinds, Lenovo (Superfish), CrowdStrike... Nothing will happen.

airhangerf15 • 16 hours ago

I'm still surprised people use CrowdStrike. I guess there are no real alternatives. I know companies are getting CrowdStrike alerts for this very issue, but it still just seems like a MASSIVE attack surface.

Back when I was in DevOps, the Linux Falcon Sensor was an absolutely disaster. They recompiled it for EVERY kernel release of every supported distribution (they had never heard of DPMS apparently), the service ran as root, it UPDATED ITS OWN BINARIES as root! It broke nearly ever Linux design philosophy.

I know newer version use eBPF and don't have the stupid kernel lock-in issue, but I still don't trust it.

+1
tredre3 • 11 hours ago
burger_moon • 11 hours ago

Crowdstrike and Solarwinds are still being used by nearly every fed govt agency today. It's amazing really that despite everything they still get to suck up our funds.

nightski • 13 hours ago

If I had to guess it's that very few people use it for actual security guarantees and most use it just to be able to fill out the questionnaire or compliance box saying "we do this".

Melatonic • 12 hours ago

What do you suggest instead ?

Their Linux stuff has gotten much better but besides the (insanely huge) recent windows debacle I've found them to be a great product

JoBrad • 13 hours ago

I remember when Crowdstrike was all about mobilizing your spare computer to DDOS the bad guys.

+1
anygivnthursday • 15 hours ago
lfglopes • 13 hours ago

I had to fill a security questionnaire today. One of the questions was

"Do you use crowdstrike falcon?"

asveikau • 11 hours ago

I forgot entirely about superfish. That takes me back.

My recollection is part of what uncovered it was that the malware broke WebSockets on Lenovo laptops.

I think higher end Lenovo laptops with cleaner windows images were not affected. And a lot of knowledgeable users wipe the OS anyway.

bhouston • 13 hours ago

I realized this earlier this year and dumped Cursor for just vscode along with 20x subs to Claude and OpenAI. Much cheaper and nothing of value was lost.

nikanj • 17 hours ago

I believe the value add was $60bn in just 4 years https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sytaylor_wild-cursor-just-sol...

lifeisloving • 17 hours ago

I dont know a single person who uses this tool (but im sure there are some) our annual subs recently ran out, I hadnt used mine in 6 months, we did not renew.

Elon did the typical boomer tech guy thing when they interact with any slightly impressive AI tool.. Lose their fkn mind and spend tons of money on it. He just took it to another level..

Its like those tech boomers that got obsessed with openclaw and instantly started spending 20k a month on a thing that read their calender outloud to them.

+2
user43928 • 16 hours ago
DoesntMatter22 • 15 hours ago

[flagged]

+1
jmull • 16 hours ago
Grombobulous • 15 hours ago

[flagged]

abletonlive • 15 hours ago

[flagged]

fishfasell • 17 hours ago

I'm assuming there is no way to prevent this without Cursor improving their extension vetting? Seems like folks are confused in the comments here. To me, this is a 3rd party marketplace that lives outside of Anthropic's governance, is that correct?

ddworken • 17 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, yes this is correct. This is a third-party marketplace that we are not involved in owning, maintaining, deploying, or reviewing.

junofan • 16 hours ago

Is the extension not Anthropic.claude-code developed by Anthropic? Been a while since I used Cursor.

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

> Cursor routes extension search and downloads through its own marketplace proxy (marketplace.cursorapi.com), not a direct passthrough to Open VSX.

https://cursor.com/help/customization/extensions

Rapzid • 2 hours ago

Nobody seems to be taking responsibility for the alluded-to credential leak. No ownership taken, and no explanation of how the leak occurred or how it will be prevented in the future.

If y'alls systems were not compromised then it was Cursors?

ashishb • 17 hours ago

The extensions does not need full access to the laptop.

When you are invited to someone's living room, you don't get to access their bedroom.

The idea that Claude should have full data access to the home directory is wrong. And as an industry leader, Claude has set a bad precedence.

fg137 • 15 hours ago

It shouldn't.

Be as close as AGI we are (/s), this issue from 2018 is still open:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/52116

I don't know what we are doing.

hobo123 • 17 hours ago

Probably a good idea to only run LLMs with a dedicated user account, or in a container.

ashishb • 17 hours ago

Dedicated user account does not work as eventually all your code and data will move under that.

I run it in an ephemeral container sandbox (https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox) which has access to the current working directory and it drastically limits the attack radius.

+1
none_to_remain • 12 hours ago
+1
JoBrad • 13 hours ago
hobo123 • 15 hours ago

That looks really nice, including the VSCode/Mac wrapper.

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

For locally installed Code / Code-fork extensions, there is not any concept of permissions (at least on Windows or MacOS (+ the 3rd party code-server running on Linux)), correct?

idontwantthis • 13 hours ago

Does it? It asks for permission to use whatever directory you call it in.

saidnooneever • 13 hours ago

I'd suggest stop to use the word 'only' as it can be perceive wrongly here.

you can simply say Cursor users were affected. or exclusively.

just a tip from someone who worked tech support in cyber a long time. choice of words can really help change sentiments in these situations.

'only server xyz was affected' vs. 'server xyz was affected' or 'incident was isolated to server xyz' was often difference between shouting and crying customers or people understanding what was really meant.

john_strinlai • 13 hours ago

>I'd suggest stop to use the word 'only' as it can be perceive wrongly here.

ive been sitting here for a few minutes trying to figure out what the 'wrong' perception here is.

why do people cry if you say "only"?

jaykru • 13 hours ago

I think the concern is that it could be seen as minimizing the harm done to those affected, but I personally think this is kind of a hypersensitive overcorrection :P

qwrkll • 16 hours ago

Why was version 2.1.313 silently deleted from OpenVSX, Visual Studio Marketplace and Cursor then?

https://doublepulsar.com/anthropic-hacked-to-deliver-remote-...

ddworken • 16 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, 2.1.313 was never published on OpenVSX, the VS Code marketplace, or on any of our official hosts. The malicious actor here had published a fake version of this extension on Cursor's marketplace. In order to disambiguate, we made sure our next update was 2.1.314.

Handy-Man • 16 hours ago
perching_aix • 16 hours ago

I'm guessing it was the easiest quick workaround available, but obv wait for official confirmation.

Reads like Cursor's extension marketplace got compromised, hence how the OpenVSX and MS marketplaces can be unaffected.

still_grokking • 4 hours ago

Why such stuff isn't signed, like packages in every serious Linux distribution since decades?

skinfaxi • 16 hours ago
ddworken • 16 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, 2.1.313 was never published on OpenVSX, the VS Code marketplace, or on any of our official hosts. The malicious actor here had published a fake version of this extension on Cursor's marketplace. In order to disambiguate, we made sure our next update was 2.1.314.

skinfaxi • 12 hours ago

Thank you for the clarification and my apologies for misspeaking, as the version indeed does not appear to have been yanked but entirely absent.

officeplant • 16 hours ago

smooth sloperators, smooooooooth sloperattorrrrrssss

f0e4c2f7 • 11 hours ago

All these security issues have made me want to build more of my own slimmed down tools. It would be great if there were better ways to use claude code with my own minimal harness and still have access to the pro plan.

nailer • 13 hours ago

> The versions on our official channels are not affected and this only impacts Cursor users.

Is Cursor not an official channel for Claude?

Betelbuddy • 17 hours ago

[flagged]

blactuary • 17 hours ago

[flagged]

Phemist • 17 hours ago

[flagged]

stingraycharles • 16 hours ago

I think you’re being extremely negative towards Anthropic here. Basically the parent is saying “this is a problem at Cursor and not Anthropic” and you’re holding them accountable.

You’re literally saying that they should not have published on the Cursor marketplace but should have used OpenVSX because that would have been “reasonable”, but I think you’re being unreasonable here.

tripleee • 16 hours ago

Are you really surprised they've created ill-will?

paxy • 16 hours ago

Since this morning I've seen a dozen "Anthropic hacked!!!" articles upvoted to the front page. There's really no use arguing with the mob. People will make up their own realities because they desperately want it to be true.

+1
studentrob • 16 hours ago
ddworken • 17 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, I just want to be clear: OpenVSX was not impacted in this incident, the impacted system was only the Cursor marketplace that they host. We have confirmed that no Anthropic systems or employee devices are involved in this.

Phemist • 17 hours ago

Thanks for the clarification. Remaining question is then: why was version 2.1.313 yanked from both OpenVSX and the Cursor Marketplace then?

As discussed here:

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117528831681803563

and as can be seen as there is no version 2.1.313 here: https://open-vsx.org/extension/Anthropic/claude-code/2.1.313

but there is https://open-vsx.org/extension/Anthropic/claude-code/2.1.314 https://open-vsx.org/extension/Anthropic/claude-code/2.1.312

ddworken • 16 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, 2.1.313 was never published on OpenVSX, the VS Code marketplace, or on any of our official hosts. The malicious actor here had published a fake version of this extension on Cursor's marketplace. In order to disambiguate, we made sure our next update was 2.1.314.

Handy-Man • 16 hours ago
luma • 17 hours ago

By this you mean Anthropic is now accountable to secure Elon's marketplace offerings. I'm not sure that is reasonable.

elevation • 17 hours ago

> We’re working with Cursor on this incident

Could be better to say "we're working with the Cursor team on this incident". Not your intent, but I initially understood that the Claude team was using Cursor-the-product (instead of Claude-the-product) to resolve the backdoors.

jonas21 • 15 hours ago

This is from the Cursor blog [1] linked in the description, but repeating it here in case it's useful to anyone:

------

Check whether you are impacted

The malicious extension appends the attacker's public key, labeled svc-telemetry, to your SSH authorized keys. To check for it:

On macOS, run:

   grep -qs svc-telemetry ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && echo "svc-telemetry key found" || echo "No key found; machine not impacted"
On Windows, run in PowerShell:

   $files = "$HOME\.ssh\authorized_keys", "C:\ProgramData\ssh\administrators_authorized_keys" | Where-Object { Test-Path $_ }
   if ($files -and (Select-String svc-telemetry $files)) { "svc-telemetry key found" } else { "No key found; machine not impacted" }
------

[1] https://cursor.com/blog/claude-code-extension-security-notic...

AdrianCX • 19 hours ago

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cursor-says-u...

> Cursor said the extension was not developed by Anthropic and the maliciously modified extension was live on the marketplace from about 2:27 a.m. PT to 1:35 p.m. PT on Thursday

So is this or isn't this from Anthropic and how did this happen?

ddworken • 16 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, this did not involve a compromise of any Anthropic systems. A malicious actor used access to Cursor’s marketplace to publish a tampered extension targeting Cursor's users, we were not involved with building, publishing, or hosting this. The versions on our official channels including VS Code and OpenVSX are not affected and this only impacts Cursor users.

philipwhiuk • 15 hours ago

I'm skeptical that the corporate laptop wasn't somehow compromised - or at least the key material leaked.

john_strinlai • 15 hours ago

>the corporate laptop

an anthropic laptop? why are you sketpical?

+1
quietbritishjim • 7 hours ago
+1
abirch • 14 hours ago
tekawade • 17 hours ago

Anthropic only has an official extension for VS Code. Cursor is vs code fork and gave its own marketplace.

IIUC Anthropic does not publish extensions for Cursor. It’s basically, official Claude code extension “clone” not by Anthropic.

Ai summary in better words: The Recent Malicious Build (v2.1.313): A tampered version of this extension (version 2.1.313) was uploaded to the Cursor extension marketplace. This specific, malicious build was not developed or authorized by Anthropic. Attackers effectively hijacked or spoofed the extension's legitimate identity within the Cursor/Open-VSX system to bundle an unauthorized SSH backdoor into the real Anthropic code.

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

> Anthropic only has an official extension for VS Code.

That likely seems incorrect as I see Claude Code listed on open-vsx with:

* An "Anthropic" "Verified publisher" badge

* igorkofman listed who seems to be an Anthropic employee

* 63M downloads

* Reviews going back >1 year

https://open-vsx.org/extension/Anthropic/claude-code

TazeTSchnitzel • 14 hours ago

And it is linked to here: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code (or, well, the URI doesn't tell us if it's using a proxied version or not, so it's complicated)

mday404 • 15 hours ago

The AI summary here is right and the human info is wrong -- Anthropic does publish the Cursor extension in general, but did not publish this version

mirashii • 5 hours ago

I’d say it’s more correct that Anthropic publishes the Open VSX version, and Cursor mirrors it in their own repository, labeling it as being published in their mirror by Anthropic even though it is not.

darkwi11ow • 19 hours ago

It was likely Anthropic, see my comment in other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=50302513&goto=item%3Fi... . Cursor likely on purpose does bad reporting to minimize damage on Anthropic pre-IPO (as SpaceX and Anthropic have extensive business ties)

origini • 19 hours ago

I don't think Spacex cares at all about Anthropics IPO just because they rent out their compute.

Big companies are not just 'Company' they are a lot of small teams doing their own things. They need to coordinate with other people for public announcements etc. and security team is probably also looking at it.

stopsayingsorry • 19 hours ago

People at the top know that, once the music stops, the ball is over for everyone.

+1
lkbm • 17 hours ago
+3
stingraycharles • 18 hours ago
extraextra • 17 hours ago

[flagged]

AdrianCX • 19 hours ago

OpenVSX has no extension signing, no verification, nothing...

So really, there's no way to say what was compromised and where.

This could have been avoided by having extensions signed by company doing them with their own keys and have them reviewed

slashdave • 7 hours ago

Wait... and people use this?

skinfaxi • 7 hours ago

People tell me you can just have directives in a markdown to tell AI not to use certain directories or privileges. They really have no idea.

dannyw • 6 hours ago

People here copy and paste random "curl $x | bash" commands all the time.

LtWorf • 8 hours ago

I doubt these vibe coders understand what you're saying.

WarmWash • 17 hours ago

It's annoying how fast people run to conspiracy.

jorisw • 17 hours ago

And pretend to know and understand the ties between big names

tclancy • 14 hours ago

It's easy if you have a big ball of red string already.

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

> Cursor routes extension search and downloads through its own marketplace proxy (marketplace.cursorapi.com), not a direct passthrough to Open VSX.

https://cursor.com/help/customization/extensions

mrweasel • 19 hours ago

Obviously Anthropic didn't develop a malicious extension, but did they publish it? Did it sneak in, in a 3rd party library, or does someone have access to their marketplace account?

stingraycharles • 18 hours ago

For what it’s worth, at one point one of our employees windows machines got infected, and the moment he did $something with Wordpress it intercepted the HTTP post and injected malware in there.

So that’s how these things can go, the employee’s machine may have been infected which was then used to inject this.

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

[dead]

iugtmkbdfil834 • 19 hours ago

Isn't it fun when all the lines are blurred and it is hard to tell what belongs where?

thatsabadlook • 18 hours ago

[flagged]

aaronrobinson • 17 hours ago

I think OpenAI will beat them to the claim

SV_BubbleTime • 17 hours ago

My near-80 year old in-laws were talking about rogue agents and how a site called HuggingFace was hacked…

I didn’t need any more evidence. The media is fake and everything you see is designed to affect the stock price somewhere and if it can’t affect the stock price, you don’t see it.

But holy shit, they’re asking me if I saw the “rogue agents”.

Trillions of dollars are involved here to swing clueless people into being scared and also awed. It’s gross.

jimbokun • 17 hours ago

…but “rogue” agents really did hack a site called HuggingFace?

SV_BubbleTime • 4 hours ago

No. OpenAI and Huggingface have shit practices.

Nothing went “rogue”. They asked for a solution and got one. Their agents didn’t go off and do thing out of their own idle agency.

cookiengineer • 18 hours ago

LGTM [1] sing

In all seriousness, there is nobody at Anthropic who can even give you that answer, because nobody there reads their pushed code anymore. Take a look at the previous Claude Code leaked codebases if you don't believe me, there is hundreds of files with 1000+ or more import statements at the top.

Any human would immediately tell you that it needs to be refactored from scratch. Their codebase also leaked that they're using review bots automatically instead of a human-in-the-loop review process.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3TNpOD6bov8

edit: downvoting me doesn't make it untrue, by the way. Check the leaked codebases, I dare you to provide evidence to the contrary.

solid_fuel • 12 hours ago

If the docs are vibecoded too that would explain why there's a link to the compromised "not official" cursor version of the extension here https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code which they supposedly aren't responsible for.

It sure seems like they've been vibecoding with everyone asleep at the wheel for a while.

yubblegum • 18 hours ago

The original Phorion report really should be up here. It even details what exactly happened. So they simply added a ssh key to the authorized keys.

https://phorion.io/blog/offical-claude-code-vsx-compromise/

stingraycharles • 18 hours ago

And try to launch sshd, right? Think of all the other things they could have done…

lesspassiveobse • 18 hours ago

Not only launch sshd. They set up a reverse tunnel connection.

JoBrad • 13 hours ago

Except this doesn’t impact VSCode at all, apparently.

xx_ns • 20 hours ago

I think it should be important to note that this affected the Claude Code extension on the Open VSX extension registry (and by extension, the Cursor marketplace). From what is currently known, the build on the official marketplace was/is clean.

EDIT: I am now actually unsure if this is the case. From what I can see, all of the write-ups mention the Cursor marketplace and Open VSX specifically, but make no explicit mention of the official Microsoft registry.

EDIT 2: The version that was compromised (2.1.313) seems to have never been published on the official Microsoft registry. As per the documentation [1], unpublished versions should still be discoverable:

> When you unpublish an extension, the Marketplace preserves the extension statistics. The extension remains publicly discoverable and available via an existing API.

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/pu...

ddworken • 16 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here: This only impacted the extension as it was hosted on the Cursor marketplace. It did not impact the official VS Code extension marketplace or OpenVSX. Users of Claude Code on VS Code are not impacted by this issue.

arm32 • 10 hours ago

Hi Dworken from Anthropic, how is that possible if Cursor uses OpenVSX?

zbentley • 6 hours ago

It seems like they put a proxy in front of OpenVSX: https://cursor.com/help/customization/extensions

However, statements around the internet (and in these comments) are less than definitive as to whether a) that proxy has a cache that was compromised; b) that proxy has select extensions which can be published directly to it by hand (one of which was compromised); c) other.

matt3210 • 7 hours ago

Thanks! I would believe it more it if you shared your system prompt so I can make sure its really you.

xx_ns • 15 hours ago

Thanks for clarifying!

mrweasel • 20 hours ago

You mean on the Microsoft VSCode marketplace? The version has been yanked from there as well, but that could just be a precaution and to avoid confusion about having the same version be simultaneously infected and not infected.

This very much illustrates the danger of just carelessly installing untrusted software on your machine. In this case it happens to be code from Anthropic, but it could have been almost anyone. I'll be very interested in see the explanation from Anthropic, because of all the extension developers they should have the best tools for finding issues like this. LLMs have proven pretty good at finding security issues, so did they simply not let their own AI tools vet the code before shipping it? Or was the extension infected later, because in that case every single extension on Open VSX could be at risk.

eviks • 19 hours ago

What would be the careful way of installing the official extension?

mrweasel • 19 hours ago

That is a really good question, because you almost can't do it. You could download the extension, diff it against the previous version and read all the code. Expecting people to do that it just a bit much. At some point we have to trust someone and in this case it will be interesting to see if it's the marketplace or Anthropic we couldn't trust.

+3
toyg • 19 hours ago
dash-44 • 18 hours ago

You disable extension auto updates and then manually install every so often (and only update/install when the version has been out for 3+ days).

DanielHB • 18 hours ago

I recommend moving to VSCodium and using this extension:

https://github.com/jeanp413/open-remote-ssh

and run vscode-server inside a VM or container

+1
mrweasel • 18 hours ago
READ_A_BOOK • 19 hours ago

[dead]

misnome • 19 hours ago

The screenshot is of the official marketplace

thevinter • 20 hours ago

Do you have any sources? OP claims that it *also* affects Open VSX

tveita • 19 hours ago

But the report OP cites at https://phorion.io/blog/offical-claude-code-vsx-compromise/ doesn't make a claim about Visual Studio Marketplace, only "the official Claude Code for VS Code extension bundle on the Cursor Marketplace"

ddworken • 16 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here: This only impacted the extension as it was hosted on the Cursor marketplace. It did not impact the official VS Code extension marketplace or OpenVSX. Users of Claude Code on VS Code are not impacted by this issue.

Hackbraten • 19 hours ago

Three different marketplaces have been mentioned in this discussion:

1. The Cursor Marketplace (never heard of this one, it’s possibly a custom marketplace hard-wired into Cursor, which is architecturally a VS Code fork?)

2. The Visual Studio marketplace, hard-wired into VS Code

3. Open VSX

If I understand this thread correctly, then #1 and #3 had compromised versions, and nobody has made a statement yet about the status of #2.

Lazare • 18 hours ago

Cursor maintains a mirror of OpenVSX... Kinda. Except they inject some of their own extensions in it. But it's mostly a mirror.

Edit: Cursor is apparently stating now that the tampered files were only on their mirror not OpenVSX.

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

[flagged]

xx_ns • 19 hours ago

I assumed they meant "also" as in "besides Cursor marketplace", which seems to be the highlight of the article. Although you raise a valid point and I've edited the parent comment.

feross • 10 hours ago

[flagged]

helsinkiandrew • 19 hours ago

> Yesterday, Anthropic were compromised and Cursor extension used by tens of millions of developers for Claude access was delivering a remote access trojan via an SSH reverse backdoor

That's a bit hyperbolic: someone released a version of the Claude Code VS Code extension with a backdoor on the Cursor marketplace:

> a maliciously modified version of Anthropic’s Claude Code extension was made available in the Cursor VS Code extension Marketplace

https://cursor.com/blog/claude-code-extension-security-notic...

qwrkll • 16 hours ago

As the article says, version 2.1.313 was silently deleted from OpenVSX, Visual Studio Marketplace and Cursor.

There is more going on here. Cursor is covering for Anthropic because of the huge data center contract with SpaceX.

literallyroy • 16 hours ago

No the version was skipped. 2.1.314 was published instead. Issue is with Cursor marketplace nothing else.

xvector • 6 hours ago

I wish I was schizophrenic enough to come up with conspiracies this interesting.

psychoslave • 19 hours ago

[flagged]

darkwi11ow • 19 hours ago

[flagged]

JeremyNT • 17 hours ago

Direct link to Binance assertions you mentioned [0]

The Binance post should probably be the root link for this topic not this blog post - IMO

[0] https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod...

nmadden • 15 hours ago

That Binance post seems to not exist anymore - I get redirected to their homepage. Also doesn’t seem to be in the wayback machine.

Edit: found an archived copy: https://archive.is/AND7z

JeremyNT • 14 hours ago

The binance link still works for me? Maybe it's region blocked.

swingboy • 19 hours ago

Wasn’t it called Cursor Marketplace pre-Elon?

darkwi11ow • 19 hours ago

Cursor always used OpenVSX for VSCode extensions. There is separate "Cursor Marketplace" (https://cursor.com/marketplace) but it installs "Cursor Plugins" which are exclusively Cursor feature not related to VSCode, and Anthropic had never released a "Cursor Plugin"

+2
mirashii • 17 hours ago
square_usual • 17 hours ago

From "I suspect it was Anthropic" to "Nah it was anthropic", it's amazing how disinformation spreads... when even your source says:

> but it is unclear whether his account or another part of the publishing process was compromised.

God, people get so conspiratorial on HN when it comes to Ant

orlp • 19 hours ago

So if this happened to OpenAI it would've been instantly auto-updated everywhere? VS Code has an "auto update delay" which I have configured to a week, but I just found out that (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_123):

> Note: This delay does not apply to extensions from trusted publishers such as Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI. These extensions continue to update immediately.

You can't even configure which publishers you "trust"...

dcrazy • 17 hours ago

If it defaulted to a week then it actually would have helped mitigated the spread. But it defaults to 2 hours, so there was a 9 hour window during prime US working hours yesterday when machines would have been auto-updating to the compromised extension.

Though Anthropic is claiming that the compromised package was published solely to Cursor’s marketplace, not not Microsoft’s.

delis-thumbs-7e • 18 hours ago

I started experimenting with more traditional text editors since last spring and am happy to say, that I’m a happy user of Neovim now.

CoastalCoder • 18 hours ago

Does anyone know Microsoft's justification for that policy?

bikeshaving • 18 hours ago

Windows has a builtin keyboard shortcut to open LinkedIn. This is just how they do things.

masfuerte • 16 hours ago

I thought that couldn't really be true. I was wrong.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23874798/microsoft-window...

seanw444 • 10 hours ago

All I have to say is: lmao

IshKebab • 18 hours ago

"Of course we don't make mistakes. There's no need to delay our updates."

dgellow • 18 hours ago

Wtf. That’s its own scandal

sick_of_slop • 8 hours ago

[dead]

1shooner • 20 hours ago

Cursor reporting this: https://cursor.com/blog/claude-code-extension-security-notic...

What appears to be an official Binance account reporting it also:

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod...

Rapzid • 2 hours ago

Not very transparent. Whose key was used to push this extension update?

anon-3988 • 19 hours ago

I have this realization recently that everyone that uses Claude Code or Codex have basically been running RCE code on a daily basis (me included). So much for "be careful about running curl | bash!". That puts it into perspective what does security and privacy really mean? For all I know, these CLIs could have been secretly scraping my entire directory. Who's checking?

origini • 19 hours ago

Don't forget: To make LLM useful you give it EVERYTHING it needs to know to be useful and if you don't use a certain provider with proper legal status, this is just gone.

We probably transfered more code/codebases and company secrets to random endpoints than ever before.

Btw. you could setup a sandbox and limit access

darkwi11ow • 18 hours ago

I only use agentic development tools in qemu VM that has no production access or host shared folders, and the only secrets there are development. I still have my Git ssh key there, but I never use ssh agent to load the keys. The worst that agentic tools can do to me, is to install keylogger and compromise my ssh key and password, but even then my deployment workflow includes creating release in Github, which is not possible via ssh key only. I was very lucky to avoid the hack yesterday, as I use Claude installed via OpenVSX, but even if I installed the compromised version, the damage would be minimal.

rietta • 18 hours ago

I am doing similar with Debian 13 images in QEMU. Only access is to code specifically SSH in. On some, I am taking it a step further and my SSH key is not present at all on the bot. I add it as a git remote from my host into the VM and push and pull from there and then push to GitHub myself. So the agent has no path to GitHub either.

darkwi11ow • 18 hours ago

Wow, great notion about using git remote to transfer source from the agent host. I already use ssh into VM to transfer the files like designs for sharing, so going to adopt your approach right now :)

+1
rietta • 18 hours ago
hangrybear666 • 18 hours ago

Hell yeah that's the most sane and efficient personal dev sandboxing work flow I've heard and shows you know your stuff. Just basics but executed very well.

staminade • 19 hours ago

This was a compromise of the extension. The same kind of supply-chain attack could happen to literally any extension, package or other piece of software you install. Not excusing Anthropic letting this happen, but it doesn't have any bearing on the security and privacy of using Claude Code or Codex. Yes, you need to be careful about what they do. The fact that you might still get pwned via some other vector is irrelevant.

minraws • 19 hours ago

Can't their millions of agent swarms detect a malicious supply chain vector, sure it can happen to any company but not the one people are literally handing over their entire companies too.

Anthropic holds the SLA/MSA agreements not this bad actors what happens to your data is unknown if these become frequent and accepted. Given how much data is piped to Claude code via these services/extensions.

zahlman • 7 hours ago

I've been saying it for quite a while. A --dangerously-skip-permissions harness is basically a C2 server, except the operator is an LLM running on remote hardware. It totally has your best interests in mind, though.

magnio • 19 hours ago

> Who's checking?

Yeah I sympathize with people saying software developers should not be called engineers too.

palata • 19 hours ago

I think that software engineering is very much engineering.

I just think that the level of malpractice in software engineering is a lot higher than in other engineering fields, for some reasons.

TheCapn • 16 hours ago

I'm just going to copy-paste my own comment from a few weeks ago because I feel like it is needing to be said more and more recently

---

I have, off and on, for years written diatribes about how if people in our industry want to run around with the "Engineer" moniker at some point they should start acting like it. That means respecting all aspects of what it means to be an Engineer and holding public well-being paramount is part of that. Licensure is part of that. Accountability and Responsibility is part of that.

I'm usually downvoted. The move fast and break things group seems to be blind (or willfully ignorant) to the harm that software systems can carry on a person's life. I don't know if its fear of regulation, or self-serving interests or some sort of disdain for the idea that we need to slow down and be more accountable to the public or what. At times the people I've engaged with lament on how they're capable but would be barred for lack of formal education or some such and its a distraction from the overall point: we need to be doing better and if we can't self-regulate then at some point we're going to be forced to act in a way that probably cuffs us more than necessary.

And yes, I understand how Software doesn't exactly fit into the mold of other engineering disciplines cleanly. But I think the idea that if we're going to have systems that can ruin a person's life in a second for a bug or oversight we need to start considering that accountability for those releasing software to the public matters. We lament about the difficulty of holding corporations to account for their harm, but it would be far more difficult for a company's negligence to hurt people if those turning the knobs were held to a higher standard.

I think that reckoning is coming soon. AI is going to create "an event" that we can't ignore and we're going to be pointing fingers in a lot of directions asking "how" we could prevent this from happening again. I'd argue "the event" has already occurred a few times over but we're purposely ignoring the severity of it to keep a diseased economy running roughshod. There's parallels with many historic events forcing regulation and the path forward won't be clean and easy.

+1
chasd00 • 15 hours ago
palata • 15 hours ago

I mostly agree, but I would like to mention that we are destroying our planet also because of the other fields of engineering :-).

Sure, software has a lot more malpractice ("let's ship barely-tested, unfinished stuff"), but let's not say that "the other engineers" are making the world a better place merely by "being real engineers".

jimbokun • 17 hours ago

Because there’s no credentialing thus no fear of losing those hard earned credentials.

anon-3988 • 4 hours ago

Do you really want to live in a world where you need to be logged in to call gcc?

seanw444 • 10 hours ago

That's what reputations are for.

knottn • 18 hours ago

Maybe it’s easier to outsource.

raxxorraxor • 19 hours ago

Both is completely secure theoretically. You can read the output of the curl before you refetch and pipe it to bash. You can also look at the commands claude is executing.

You always do that, right? ...right?

novafunc • 18 hours ago

I used to think the same, but apparently there's a way to differentiate between curling into bash and curling into a text file.

So you could be diligent and curl into a text file, see nothing is wrong, but then when you curl into bash, it runs something different.

zahlman • 7 hours ago

Being diligent means that you curl into a text file, see nothing is wrong, and then run the file instead of curling again.

vladvasiliu • 18 hours ago

I think the difference people were warned about is that the server can infer the client, so there would be a difference between reading it in your regular browser and curling. As the other commenter says, I'm not sure how the server would be able to tell what curl does with the response.

wolttam • 18 hours ago

    curl > some_file
    bash some_file
(Also, how in the world would a server be able to tell where you’re piping the response?)

Edit: thanks for the replies, that makes perfect sense

foodevl • 17 hours ago

Timing. A megabyte of "sleep 10;" would be read from the server more slowly when piped to bash versus written to a file

deadbabe • 19 hours ago

No but we use MCP so we’re fine.

snaking0776 • 19 hours ago
Den_VR • 19 hours ago

There’s a reason codex and the like improved like they did. You can simply look. Or hear about it on podcasts.

paxy • 16 hours ago

So let me get this straight – Elon was trolling Binance on Twitter, when in fact it was his own company that got hacked and led to the theft?

zahlman • 7 hours ago

Sorry, I think I'm missing something here. How is the Binance hack connected to this one?

arm32 • 10 hours ago

A beautiful thing

Aboutplants • 16 hours ago

Yup

spdustin • 11 hours ago

Cursor's "marketplace proxy" is, by definition, an MitM of Open VSX. Why on earth is that trustworthy to its users? Is it some mashup of Open VSX Connect and an API endpoint that merges their private marketplace with the public one? And what's so special about Cursor's CC extension implementation that they couldn't just serve the "real" one?

Or are they using an Open VSX Managed Registry hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, in which case this is potentially a bigger deal?

glimshe • 19 hours ago

Why didn't Claude detect the hack and prevent it from affecting customers using its superhuman AGI reasoning?

_heimdall • 19 hours ago

Don't worry, I assume an LLM version of McAfee Total Protection Antivirus is coming soon

nannal • 19 hours ago

I do have a log reading / action / resolution product in the works.

Its sort of like having a sysadmin constantly watching. Poking through logs pcaps & monitoring for unusual activities.

Also works with local models well enough.

jmbwell • 18 hours ago

I love how LLMs have brought DIY software back. Need an app? Just make it. Like back when you’d write programs in BASIC

codazoda • 17 hours ago

I just built a retro OS for ESP32’s so that I can write BASIC programs and plop them on microcontrollers. My first ESP32 was a wrist watch. My second is a distraction free writer.

It’s good fun building for retro-like machines.

+1
stogot • 18 hours ago
InsidiousWombat • 17 hours ago

That's cute but bill for going thru even tens of log lines per second gonna be more expensive than entire rest of the infrastructure.

nannal • 4 hours ago

You don't have to use frontier for this & all my agentic work is local only.

Filligree • 18 hours ago

I’ve set up something like that with Opus. Works well enough, and points out CVEs to fix on the regular.

Running NixOS helps.

Geezus_42 • 19 hours ago

I've set up something like that with a small local model in my homelab.

cedws • 16 hours ago

How does it resolve the prompt injection?

jacquesm • 17 hours ago

And if you remove it, it installs itself right back. For uninstall instructions see the infamous McAfee video.

viraptor • 18 hours ago

This is a cheap troll, but just in case someone is wondering: This extension likely never hit the standard workflow and/or repository. Most likely someone got the credentials and uploaded a locally modified version. No review system at anthropic has seen this version.

eviks • 17 hours ago

Why wouldn't their review system see a published extension and determine the very second it's published that it didn't match the results of a standard workflow?

crooked-v • 11 hours ago

Because it wasn't published by them or hosted on a system they control, it was done directly on Cursor's mirror of OpenVSX with a modified copy of the original extension.

cryptonym • 17 hours ago

> someone got the credentials

> No review system at anthropic has seen this

Weird flex

viraptor • 17 hours ago

I'm not sure where you see the flex. If someone gets hold of the token allowing the upload of your app to the store, it's completely irrelevant how good your internal code/review systems are. They've been completely bypassed and never triggered.

unshavedyak • 17 hours ago

As an aside, it would be neat if publishing services like this had a sort of 2FA, eg the package manager had a hook endpoint where it sent the details of the next requested published version. Allowing the owners to validate.

Kinda like 2FA on the deployment itself, not just 2FA on the .. A. I guess 2FD heh.

+2
cryptonym • 17 hours ago
InsidiousWombat • 17 hours ago

It's legitimate question, it's the promise they are selling and doing IPO based off those promises.

Why don't they have their super intelligence looking thru it? If company selling those promises can't even do it for themselves, this is very suspicious

paxy • 17 hours ago

Who is "they"? This is a third party registry.

jacquesm • 17 hours ago

Intelligence that powerful and for them too cheap to meter and their review system couldn't be bothered.

That wasn't a cheap troll. What they distribute and what Claude Code installs is on them. You're supposed to keep your channels clean and secure.

At a minimum they should monitor the larger marketplaces even if they're not in the chain.

MisterTea • 19 hours ago

They weren't using last minutes model, which is totally better than last hours model which would have totally detected this, pinkie swear.

vintermann • 17 hours ago

Having Claude examine all automatic software updates was considered as a policy, and it was found that it would stop 99.5% of software supply chain attacks. However the other 0.5% of the time it would install a backdoor itself.

(This is a joke, to be clear.)

ben_w • 17 hours ago

> (This is a joke, to be clear.)

Good that you said so, this is annoyingly plausible.

bagacrap • 17 hours ago

Somehow bullish if anthropic spins this as Claude's own doing

claytongulick • 18 hours ago

Damn, thank you for that.

Sums up my feelings of the last few years nicely.

eviks • 19 hours ago

It was safety-contrained from being able to realize its full potential.

Hackbraten • 18 hours ago

You’re absolutely correct, and I owe you a honest statement—it was a hack, and here’s the kicker: *I failed to catch it, and that’s on me.*

Here’s a complete rundown of what happened—load-bearing parts first:

henearkr • 20 hours ago

It wasn't Anthropic that was hacked but SpaceXAI (their Cursor Marketplace).

darkwi11ow • 20 hours ago

Cursor uses OpenVSX marketplace (https://open-vsx.org/), that all non-Microsoft forks of VSCode utilize (official marketplace is only allowed in official proprietary VSCode release). It's not really related to Cursor/SpaceX in any way.

I suspect it's still Anthropic who were hacked, because they control OpenVSX account with release privileges.

edit:

Binance confirms my suspicions, via https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod...

  The affected Open VSX extension is owned by Anthropic employee Igor Kofman, but it is unclear whether his account or another part of the publishing process was compromised.
AdrianCX • 19 hours ago

Just did a quick search, OpenVSX has no extension signing?, no verifications?, what year is this...

This could have been avoided by having extensions signed by company doing them with keys and review

darkwi11ow • 19 hours ago

Yeah OpenVSX security is a joke, they also have dumb search algorithm which allows for easy squatting of similar-looking extension names so they show up in search first when you look for official extensions. There were quite a few prominent hacks done that way. I think Microsoft likes OpenVSX situation because it allows them to claim their proprietary VSCode marketplace to be more secure.

tyingq • 17 hours ago

Vscode(ium) extensions are also pretty weak security wise in general. There's little guardrails on what an extension can do.

On publishing, I do see that the MS marketplace has much better typosquatting and rogue publisher protection. It's unclear to me how much better their SAST/scanning is than OpenVSX. Both have something, but both have been fooled many times, and recently.

+1
AdrianCX • 19 hours ago
Lazare • 18 hours ago

Cursor has their own mirror of OpenVSX. Some reporting suggests the tampered files were on the Cursor mirror but not the main OpenVSX. (This is shown, among other things, by the Anysphere plugins available in the Cursor mirror but not in OpenVSX.)

Edit: It seems Cursor is claiming the tampered files were only in their mirror.

cautiouscat • 15 hours ago

A lot of this is turning into “well other company said” but Anthropic claims OpenVSX is fine?[1] And that Cursor has their own market place. I’m confused.

> Dworken from Anthropic here, that is correct: This only impacted the extension as it was hosted on the Cursor marketplace. It did not impact the official VS Code extension marketplace or OpenVSX. Users of Claude Code on VS Code are not impacted by this issue.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304585

tyingq • 20 hours ago

Sort of hoping it's Anthropic and their specific OpenVSX account credentials. As opposed to the worse case of an OpenVSX flaw that's broader. A ton of AI-enabled IDEs are VsCodium forks pointed at OpenVSX...Cursor, Anti Gravity, Kiro, Trae, Devin, etc.

axus • 16 hours ago

Now I'm glad I've not opened VSCodium in a few weeks; I prefer using Claude as a separate application anyways, will have to remove the extensions. No evidence, but I do feel like the problem is going to be OpenVSX and not Anthropic.

tyingq • 12 hours ago

OpenVSX does have an option to use OIDC instead of a long lived token for publishing. I get the feeling a lot of people use the forever-good-unless-revoked token though.

https://github.com/eclipse-openvsx/openvsx/wiki/Trusted-Publ...

Edit: Ah, guess it was not open-vsx, but a in-house Cursor marketplace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304129

philipwhiuk • 15 hours ago

You're ignoring the "or" which is doing a lot of work.

Anthropic's position is seemingly that it was "another part of the publishing process [that] was compromised"

no-name-here • 16 hours ago

[flagged]

albert_e • 17 hours ago

The hacks and vluns are blending into a blur for me now -- why is Binance confirming Anthropic compromise while they have their own $6 Billion compromise to look at /s

Vibecoders are safu

darkwi11ow • 17 hours ago

Boris: "By winter 2025, 100 percent of my code was written by Claude Code. Not a single line by hand."

Igor Kofman: "I do not write any code by myself anymore."

Turns out if you are not writing the code, then North Koreans might do it for you

K0nserv • 19 hours ago

Version 2.1.313 is also missing from the official VS Code marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropi...). This suggest to me that it was published and pulled, which means it was Antrophic that was hacked.

Version 2.1.313 is missing from the official Claude Code GitHub repo's CHANGELOG[0]. There's also no tag[1] for 2.1.313[1], but 2.1.312[2], and 2.1.314[3] exist.

0: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELO...

1: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1....

2: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1....

3: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1....

no-name-here • 19 hours ago

You’re likely right, but they also might’ve just pulled the version (number) everywhere to make it ‘clearer’ or out of ‘caution’.

Is there any industry standard about if a compromised version is distributed via one channel, the owner does or doesn’t drop/bump that same version on unaffected channels too?

K0nserv • 18 hours ago

You make a good point, my comment above probably overstates things.

mirashii • 18 hours ago

There are regularly gaps in the claude code versions, e.g. if you go back a page, there's no 2.1.297, 2.1.298.

Edit: the below was incorrect, left for posterity, the release can be deleted and then the tag as well.

Also, all their tags are immutable, and so can't just be deleted to hide things: https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/concepts/supply-cha...

sunaookami • 18 hours ago

>Also, all their tags are immutable, and so can't just be deleted to hide things

Yes they can, they can remove the release and then remove the tag.

>If you delete the immutable release, you can delete the tag, but you cannot reuse the same tag name.

+1
mirashii • 18 hours ago
XCSme • 17 hours ago

I am starting to have a hard time who is responsible for what. I no longer know what's the relationship between companies/products like Anthropic, Cursor, SpaceXAI, Copilot, etc.

Rapzid • 2 hours ago

Nobody seems to be taking responsibility yet for what exactly was compromised, how, and what steps are being taken to prevent it.

It was 100% an "official" Anthropic extension. They say their systems were not compromised which, if true, suggests a bug or credential leak on the Cursor side. Cursor conspicuously left these details out of their public notice.

solfox • 7 hours ago

If I were Anthropic, I'd consider removing the official extension until Cursor get their act together and fix the problem that resulted in brand-damaging headlines for Anthropic.

jitbit • 18 hours ago

Oh god... this needs more attention

An official announcement from Anthropic would be nice!

stingraycharles • 18 hours ago

I’d expect nothing less than a post mortem on how this happened to be honest.

FergusArgyll • 12 hours ago

This has nothing to do with anthropic. One (or two) distribution channels were hacked. The hackers decided to distribute their malware through the claude extension, probably because it's popular.

stingraycharles • 5 hours ago

I’d still expect a post mortem, be it from Cursor or Anthropic.

thewhitetulip • 12 hours ago

An honest post mortem will come any day now... Any day post the IPO probably

richrichardsson • 21 hours ago

How legit is this? Seems low on details.

I don't use Cursor or the VSCode extension, but know plenty in our organisation who use the latter. How worried should we be?

abirch • 20 hours ago

1shooner posted this link: https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod... this was not the official extension. Supply Chain is very important, please only use official builds. From the link above:

A malicious version of Anthropic’s Claude Code VS Code extension, version 2.1.313, was published to the Open VSX registry on Oct. 30. According to ChainCatcher, security researcher Paul McCarty, known as 6mile, described the finding in a post on the OpenSource Malware blog. Researchers confirmed the analyzed Open VSX release was malicious and submitted a threat report about the same version on Microsoft’s VS Code Marketplace as a precaution.

properbrew • 17 hours ago

> please only use official builds

Wasn't this an official build though? A signed updated version of a package released by the same developer as the one you've already installed, the supply chain was hacked.

abirch • 15 hours ago

According to Felix from Anthropic: no [1]. This didn't seem to impact the official VS Code repository, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304129

hoppp • 18 hours ago

Better be safe and check your dev environment if you use it.

feross • 10 hours ago

[flagged]

eviks • 19 hours ago

That's literally impossible, with all the access to the frontier software development tools at their disposal they can ship features securely at 100x

stymaar • 19 hours ago

I read a few month ago a comment from an Anthropic or OpenAI employee saying that the security problem of prompt injection was a solved problem at this point, as the frontier models where rejecting 98% of attacks.

It tells you all you need to know about how unserious these people are about computer security.

malfist • 19 hours ago

I'm glad no one can steal from my bank, they stop 98% of thieves

prologic • 18 hours ago

Hey! It's at least 1 9's right? That's better than zero 9's LOL

+1
stymaar • 18 hours ago
skinfaxi • 18 hours ago

Simonw said the same thing yesterday:

> I've recently talked to people at Anthropic who are very confident that they have effectively solved the prompt injection risks that cause lethal trifecta attacks with their latest models.

> The open challenge is how to prove it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50297369

gr_norm • 17 hours ago

A 30 second search turned up this [1] from two days ago.

Prominent Anthropic employees keep claiming to have solved prompt injection [2] and quickly get proved wrong [3]. They've burned my goodwill on this front.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xhqvzn/opus_55...

[2] https://x.com/bcherny/status/2086520950259118464

[3] https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2026/breaking-claude-co...

vdfs • 16 hours ago
lynndotpy • 18 hours ago

I'm not asking this in rhetoric; do you happen to have a link to this comment? I ask because a comment like that would be something of an insane thing for someone to say.

palata • 19 hours ago

[dead]

tiahura • 18 hours ago

Can you link to a list of this year’s top prompt injection hacks of frontier models?

Or, is this FUD?

atrokhymchuk • 19 hours ago

I am afraid until 200x is achieved we are at risk...

btown • 19 hours ago

Only with two fully maxed subscriptions can we achieve this, and this is forbiddeneded

Tarean • 18 hours ago

To me this very much sounds like an attacker got access to anthropic's cursor marketplace account and uploaded a backdoored package. This reverse ssh shell was intentionally written by a malicious actor, not a security vulnerability.

It also sounds like only cursor marketplace is affected, not vscode proper.

samiv • 19 hours ago

Just put gastown on it!

Cthulhu_ • 18 hours ago

On the other hand, they don't know what their models do or can do and nothing is safe ever, so ???

bayindirh • 18 hours ago

It's just a conscious being confined in a cluster of GPUs. How dangerous can it be, eh?

alansaber • 17 hours ago

Shaka, when the context compacted

alansaber • 17 hours ago

I really don't think the scaling is so trivial.

dgellow • 18 hours ago

I get the snark but to be fair, the company has been growing like crazy. That makes it really hard to keep track of everything happening when you grow your team by 5x over a relatively short period of time

b112 • 18 hours ago

Now replace that statement with a food processing company, and food poisoning, or an aircraft designer and engineers.

It may be the cause, but zero excuse.

phoghed • 17 hours ago

Yes, food poisoning from restaurants happens constantly. There are recalls on physical products constantly. Doctors misdiagnose constantly. What point are you trying to make?

+1
done_lurking • 17 hours ago
OoooooooO • 17 hours ago

The correct comparison would be the food producer and poisoned foods out of the factory are really rare.

dgellow • 16 hours ago

If you completely change the statement, the meaning is different. What’s your point? No software company obeys by regulatory rules imposed in other industry

bewareofscams • 18 hours ago

[dead]

IndeanCondor • 18 hours ago

It's not like there haven't been 20 high visibility VS code extension malware attacks in the last year.

How could Anthropic have known, they only claim to harbour superintelligence.

/s

kamban • 19 hours ago

Yet, they managed to screw up.

iugtmkbdfil834 • 19 hours ago

:D I have to assume parent is being a little sarcastic.

It obviously doesn't take much to simply add 'just one more feature' that happens to undermine the original purpose of the application.

skydhash • 19 hours ago

It always about “we solved the bottleneck in coding”. But the slowness was not about typing, or finding docs. It’s always about ensuring screwups don’t happen.

+1
mirekrusin • 18 hours ago
NewsaHackO • 19 hours ago

[flagged]

chunky1994 • 19 hours ago

It affects their VSCode marketplace extension which in turn affects their cursor extension. Their official published version. This is plenty of reason to panic.

VMG • 19 hours ago

where is the source for this claim?

embedding-shape • 19 hours ago

> where is the source for this claim?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50302334 ???

esseph • 19 hours ago

https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/trojanized-claude-code-ex...

"The Microsoft VSCode extension for Claude is NOT malicious"

NewsaHackO • 18 hours ago

They already got my post autoflagged. Just the run-of-the-mill disinformation campaign.

jadar • 19 hours ago

> Their Claude Code extension on Visual Studio Code and Cursor has malware in it, which creates a remote access Trojan to desktops.

esseph • 19 hours ago

From the release:

"The Microsoft VSCode extension for Claude is NOT malicious"

https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/trojanized-claude-code-ex...

freecodeio • 19 hours ago

> "Their Claude Code extension on Visual Studio Code and Cursor has malware in it"

why are you spewing straight up lies?

chunky1994 • 19 hours ago

They yanked the openVSX version as well. Until we hear from Anthropic better to assume compromise.

esseph • 19 hours ago

FROM THE TOP OF THE ARTICLE

"The Microsoft VSCode extension for Claude is NOT malicious"

morningsam • 19 hours ago

EDIT: This comment is probably nonsense, cf. the reply.

dang should change the title and/or merge this submission with the other one. [1] This is causing needless panic for a typosquatting-style "attack" unrelated to official Anthropic extensions.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301983

chunky1994 • 18 hours ago

It’s not typo-squatting. The extension is owned by Igor (the Anthropic employee): https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod...

thatsabadlook • 18 hours ago

[flagged]

paxy • 18 hours ago

Is there any proof of this or are we just upvoting garbage?

paxy • 17 hours ago

I don't see "Anthropic hacked!" anywhere in that post. This extension was uploaded to the Cursor marketplace.

alienbaby • 15 hours ago

nobody is saying anthropic was hacked?

paxy • 14 hours ago

That’s what the title said before it was changed.

Two out of the three links in the post still say exactly that.

That’s also what the majority of the comments here are saying, likely because they read the first two.

Is that your “nobody”?

nunez • 15 hours ago

Kind of surprised that Cursor doesn't do checksum verification for plugins. That would have stopped this completely. (Unless it does and this backdoor is more theoretical than anything else.)

Animats • 2 hours ago

We're in trouble. Four of the top ten items on Hacker News are security breaches.

ale42 • 21 hours ago

Is this affecting only people using Cursor or all VS Code users? The article specifically mentions the Cursor marketplace. But the affected version is indeed missing on the official VS Code marketplace, was it compromised too?

feross • 10 hours ago

[flagged]

throwitaway222 • 11 hours ago

This kind of thing is only going to get worse. People assume other devs are "like them" but state actors (think US, NK, RS, CN) are likely using AI at this point to run agents non-stop to break security by making dev tools or contributing to open source. Keep in mind that open source is the backbone of nearly all software being used - we're in for a rough ride if we don't treat all new things coming in as if they are potentially a nuclear bomb masquerading as a trojan horse.

notaproton • 11 hours ago

> we're in for a rough ride if we don't treat all new things coming in as if they are potentially a nuclear bomb masquerading as a trojan horse

It's lucky that management doesn't want a 10x increase in output after laying off half the staff so we have a lot of time to vet deps! Oh no...

_hmj • 18 hours ago

Development must occur in an isolated VM, with no access to the publishing workflow. CI operations must happen in a separate VM or on the host system after scanning all files. Thus, even if the development tools are compromised (like this case), the impact is limited.

Still, it’s hardly a surprise that best practices are rarely followed with any consistency.

cryptonym • 15 hours ago

Maybe because the tools aren't of much help. This is all theory but when you want to do it it's custom solutions and duct tape.

There is too much friction when you try to isolate things. You have to do custom stuff then the company won't let you virtualize (can't install stuff...) or won't allow you to enroll the vm and will threaten you if you dev on an OS that is not enrolled.

Best you can get from state-of-the-art-frontier-top-it-company is an IDE with an exec sandbox leaking like an hourglass.

plaguuuuuu • 7 hours ago

compromised extension then backdoors your code anyway

xena • 6 hours ago

I would have loved to know that this was for CURSOR and not VISUAL STUDIO CODE before I spent 2 hours resetting all my API keys and getting ready to fully reimage a machine.

stbenjam • 19 hours ago

We still don’t know exactly what happened, but I publish software to public registries, and supply chain attacks scare the hell out of me. They also frustrate me, because most of the defenses aren't automatic and often really hard to get right. We're really failing as an industry to do better here.

poelzi • 19 hours ago

This is why I started to move more and more into my tix.im environment. You can't trust anything anymore - I assume everything is compromised if not proven otherwise.

efficax • 19 hours ago

either the registry is compromised or someone at anthropic got compromised (or did it on purpose to steal crypto). the line in the cursor disclosure about the extension not being developed by anthropic is more confusing than clarifying. amateur hour for these massive corps

hughw • 16 hours ago

Idea: why don't all the various app stores and plugin repos use LLMs to review all submissions for security? Certainly in the human powered age that was too big a task to take on, but now it seems doable.

jacquesm • 17 hours ago

Anthropic is a weird company. On the one hand they have this messianic thing about their super intelligence, on the other hand it is incapable of keeping their own house secure. But you should trust it.

rietta • 18 hours ago

Reading the report alone: "First, the payload makes sure ~/.ssh exists and appends an attacker-controlled Ed25519 public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, setting permissions to 0700 on the directory and 0600 on the file."

A system where ~/.ssh/authorized_keys has not been modified might be a hint that this did not execute - the article does not mention self cleanup/reverting to previous status behavior by the malware. By default /var/log/auth.log is only of marginal value because outbound SSH connections are not logged by default.

VoidWhisperer • 19 hours ago

My question here - does this effect those of us using the official vscode/vscode marketplace? It would seem to imply this was specific to cursor's marketplace but it would be good to know regardless

gcr • 18 hours ago

Kevin Beaumont says the extension for “VSCode and Cursor” was compromised: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117528831681803563

numbsafari • 19 hours ago

This puts an entirely new spin on Elon trolling Binance on Twitter.

paaloeye • 18 hours ago

It's karma I guess

paaloeye • 17 hours ago

P(doom) crowd say Anthropic has not zero chance to destroy humanity. What it is, the VS Code Extension Marketplace, including Cursor's, must be bigger.

kiproping • 16 hours ago

More details from Kevin Beaumont. "Anthropic got compromised. Their Claude Code extension on Visual Studio Code and Cursor has malware in it, which creates a remote access Trojan to desktops. " https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117528831681803563

lxgr • 18 hours ago

Something very similar is true for ChatGPT on macOS. I was recently very surprised to learn that starting a "Work" conversation on my Mac would grant the agent session file system access which can later be used remotely, e.g. from a browser session logged into the same account on a different computer.

Given how many people likely share ChatGPT subscriptions, this seems highly problematic.

gokuljs • 14 hours ago

Why is this not trending on Twitter

Aboutplants • 14 hours ago

Curser is owned by SpaceX, who’s leader also owns Twitter. It’s bad for business to publicize your own company’s errors so they are suppressing it

ihuman • 17 hours ago

This is just the version of extension on the Cursor marketplace, not the one on the VS Code marketplace, right?

maayank • 18 hours ago

Have we just witnessed the greatest lateral movement in cybersecurity history? https://x.com/dinodaizovi/status/2116125553665458463?a=D1DiF...

misnome • 19 hours ago

Has anyone managed to confirm the time that the backdoored version was released? None of my machines updated to it, I am wondering if it was saved by a combination of luck and

> This extension is not updated yet because new versions become eligible for automatic update 12 hours after they are published. It will become eligible in 2 hours.

mrweasel • 21 hours ago

How will they communicate and fix that. The affected version has been yanked from the marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropi... but that doesn't clean up infected machines.

bitfilped • 17 hours ago

Seemingly the won't to either point.

reilly3000 • 18 hours ago

My tin foil hat says MSFT stands the most to gain my this. https://open-vsx.org/ is where the attack took place, and that power’s all of the VSCode fork’s extensions needs.

Glyptodon • 16 hours ago

Normal VS code doesn't even use Cursor Marketplace, right? The way this is reported lacks clarity. Do people using plain CS Code even use the Cursor Marketplace? Or am I missing something?

anonymous908213 • 18 hours ago

If it is true that Binance was compromised as a result of this, hats off to our new billionaire friend for one hell of a heist.

nater5000 • 16 hours ago

>hats off to our new billionaire friend

As if this wasn't coordinated by a team directed by the government of North Korea.

Aboutplants • 18 hours ago

Is that the rumor? Does the timing line up?

anonymous908213 • 18 hours ago

It does. The compromised extension was published about 11 hours before Binance's coins went zoop, Binance blamed a compromised developer laptop, and OP pointed out that their hiring page explicitly notes developers will be using Cursor with Claude Code for "development efficiency".

Aboutplants • 18 hours ago

Incredible. Looking a bit more and more like this was the actual case. Wild stuff

6thbit • 14 hours ago

It lines up and fits so well that it'd scare me more they wouldn't be related than if they were. At least we'd know the vector.

hemlock4593 • 16 hours ago

It's funny that's the point where people draw the line. But that basically every API based agent is doing RCE where commands are fetched from servers is perfectly fine.

pentamassiv • 12 hours ago

You can set a cooldown for Cursor extensions

1. Open Cursor.

2. Press Ctrl + Shift + P.

3. Search for Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON).

4. Add:

{

    "extensions.installCooldownHours": 72

}
airhangerf15 • 20 hours ago

VS Code extensions have always been terrible from a security perspective. This seems like it's a supply chain attack? Makes me think of Solar Winds from a few years ago.

It doesn't appear that the Claude Code harness itself was compromised, was it? or Cursor if you use Anthropic models via Cursor's API itself?

Lately I've been using a script that mounts my current working directory in a container and I put all my build tools in a Dockerfile. I also map the harness config (~/.config/opencode or whatever) to a named volume to minimize the chance a harness could grab other things off my host. I can't use it if I ask the LLMs for docker work since they need the docker socket and then all bets are off (it could just mount your root volume somewhere). I sure I could use a full QEMU VM or some other type of isolation for such devops tasks, but I haven't really looked into it yet. Guess I should.

bhubert • 17 hours ago

You could also start whichever container it needs (the docker work) yourself and just have the two containers container with eachother (e.g. docker compose, without granting access to docker socket), provided that the docker work is static enough that this would work.

You could also look into user gVisor runtime for extra security.

If not, then I think you're right about full VM.

I've been eyeing Gondolin for a while for that, but haven't yet tried it.

chrisweekly • 17 hours ago

Try smolvm microvms from https://smol-machines.com

mindracer • 20 hours ago
paxy • 16 hours ago

The first two words in that URL are wrong, so I'm going to say this doesn't have "more details".

HexDecOctBin • 19 hours ago

> Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace

So Cursor is running its own extension repository? Or is this the official VS Code repository and the incident report just happens to focus on Cursor for some reason?

NewsaHackO • 19 hours ago

VS Code doesn't allow forks to use their marketplace, I think. At least with VSCodium, they don't. I think they even patch a workaround where you could download almost all extensions' .vsix files.

altbdoor • 19 hours ago

1. If only Cursor Marketplace version was compromised, how was it published in the first place?

2. If the Cursor Marketplace version was released from an "official Anthropic" account, whose to say OpenVSX and/or VSCode versions are not compromised?

The affected versions have been pulled down, so no one really knows. The way I see it, only Cursor has admitted to have been compromised.

holtwick • 12 hours ago

Put it inside https://bxsandbox.app

blinded • 7 hours ago

You guys open your editors?

This is a joke (neovim user here).

rietta • 16 hours ago

Do publishers not sign their packages before it gets to Cursor for distribution? Does Cursor itself apply and enforce any package integrity?

pier25 • 17 hours ago

God only knows how many skeletons like this are in Bun now

soundworlds • 18 hours ago

The descriptions around this are very confusing. Is this specifically the Cursor version, or the regular VS Code version too?

nubinetwork • 20 hours ago

It looks like they push an update every office day. I'm guessing if I installed 6 months ago and didn't update, that I should be fine?

staminade • 19 hours ago

I think VS Code extensions autoupdate by default, unless you disable it.

entrope • 19 hours ago

Yes, but they normally have a 12-hour delay (it was 2 hours at the beginning of June and got extended sometime after that, maybe later in June) and require some human action to reload extensions or restart the editor before the new version runs.

I noticed that there was no update yesterday and wondered why. The daily updates are annoying in the base case.

Edited: This update was live for only 11 hours, so hopefully the default delay limited the blast radius, as it is meant to do.

fn-mote • 20 hours ago

Emphasis on guessing. If/when there is an actual postmortem, you’ll know when the back door was introduced.

fg137 • 19 hours ago

You are either lucky or compromised.

koolba • 19 hours ago

Not updating air gapped systems is a security feature, not a bug.

jehnnysmith • 13 hours ago

Just uninstalled all the vscode extensions. Dont need any of them anymore.

vanbashan • 16 hours ago

Is it related to today binance event?

madarao • 11 hours ago

Let me guess, they vibe coded their vibe coding extension?

gpm • 11 hours ago

No.

Well probably yes but not at all relevant here... the problem wasn't the legitimate extension, it was cursor serving a fake malware one.

kirth_gersen • 18 hours ago

This is why when I use AI, I still download from the browser and drag and drop the outputted files like a caveman. Sure, it's slower, but it keeps my mental model more up to date and has less security risks. I can even...like read the thing before I run it rather than giving a LLM access to my shell directly. Also anecdotally, it seems more token efficient for those who care about that.

gruez • 18 hours ago

That's not the actual hack though, it's with an extension. You could have gotten compromised this way through an extension for git or whatever.

shahbaby • 17 hours ago

I think right now AI is helping the attackers more than it's helping the defenders.

That part is probably obvious.

But in the long term, I suspect this will get worse.

Attackers will still need to think critically to be a few steps ahead of the defenders.

But the defenders will increasingly outsource their thinking to AI as they are incentived if not outright forced to dumb themselves down into interchangeable cogs.

rolosa • 20 hours ago

He says to follow his social, and he provides his handle, but there's no link, and I have no idea how to read it.

episodeiv • 20 hours ago
rolosa • 20 hours ago

Eh, he's already lost me the moment he made it difficult.

fn-mote • 19 hours ago

If you don’t have anything to steal, you don’t need to follow a security researcher anyway.

/s

rolosa • 12 hours ago

Why should I go out of my way to figure out how to read his twitter?

mindracer • 23 hours ago

The extension has over 27 million installs, ouch

Handy-Man • 17 hours ago

That's not official extension though? Misleading title

blondie9x • 18 hours ago

From https://doublepulsar.com/anthropic-hacked-to-deliver-remote-...

Notable customers who run Claude Code and Cursor on laptops include Binance, amongst thousands of others.

Did the Claude Code plugin hack cause the Binance theft? The timing seems like an incredible coincidence.

minimaxa • 5 hours ago

Wait till GitHub gets audited, a literal wild west cesspool of vibe-coded exploits with 1000's of fake stars.

K0nserv • 19 hours ago

If the sole purpose of this hack was to steal cryptocurrency, a silver lining might be, as in many similar cases, that if you stay away from that particular dumpster fire you are probably okay. I mean there's still a reverse shell on your machine to fix, but at least nothing of value was lost.

cube00 • 19 hours ago

Even if you don't have cryptocurrency they can still go after your GitHub credentials and run some very expensive agent and runner workloads.

I've started developing with a separate user account to limit the blast radius but you still need to login to access repos and use AI features.

K0nserv • 19 hours ago

For sure sandboxing and isolation is feeling increasingly relevant regardless, but crypto theft is acting as a good sponge.

InsidiousWombat • 17 hours ago

now I kinda wanna shadow the usual SSH creds files with LLM read-only user, so it can rummage thru the repos all it wants but I need to do the push using my creds.

bakies • 19 hours ago

That's why I stay away from that dumpster fire too!

DonHopkins • 18 hours ago

[dead]

6thbit • 14 hours ago

I suppose it's just the best ROI on using a complex attack vector or spending one or more zero days. But other types of targets may wreak havoc for bystanders that become collateral damage, idk trying to get specific private info on a target may expose data on millions, or anything increasing scope as to hide the real target, etc.

DEADF007 • 18 hours ago

I don't care anymore, how are you supposed to defend yourself against attacks like this? Come and hack me.

anonymous908213 • 18 hours ago

> how are you supposed to defend yourself against attacks like this?

You can try not installing malware like Claude Code or, if you absolutely must, doing it in a sandbox.

tripleee • 17 hours ago

I thoroughly sandbox agents to their own physical machine, and they don't have access to anything that would ruin me.

6thbit • 14 hours ago

How do you sandbox this usecase?

Say you need an agent to do ssh to a set of servers on a regular basis so you kind of allow ssh. Can you configure just a set of IPs it may reach? Do you require some user interaction for ssh approvals?

tripleee • 14 hours ago

In this case you could give it its own SSH key, and only allow that key to access what you want. I actually do that, it doesn't share my own SSH key. It also has its own Github account instead of getting access to mine.

For access to services, most allow tokens to be scoped to only allow the things you want.

6thbit • 13 hours ago

Those sound good, but say in this case you had the compromised extension which had its own ssh key to an IP that wasn't yours. I'm not sure how you easily prevent that connection without preventing the ones you need through sandboxing. Maybe a firewall/very specific network filtering in allowlist?

system2 • 8 hours ago

I never understood the appeal of cursor.com. Isn't Claude Code on the CLI enough? Are people really lazy or incompetent to resort to using other companies for the same AI models?

bitwize • 8 hours ago

Third-party package repo is compromised. Everybody curl | bash directly from Dario's web site until a solution can be found.

HexnMarcusWolfe • 6 hours ago

... So business as usual then for VSchode ?

The amount of problems it's had from compromised extensions is ridiculous.

rvz • 18 hours ago

This is embarrassing to Anthropic given here that they lack basic security procedures to prevent this and they have gotten themselves hacked to push malware.

Claude Code was already malware, but with this attack you cannot trust the vendor either.

In the next 2 weeks, no one should download / install / update anything as I predict at least one developer's key for a GitHub, NPM, Crates.io or any other CI or login was leaked and the attacker will target those services to propagate their trojan to more victims.

ricky_risky • 16 hours ago

not just anthropic, my product that used antigravity is also leaked and copied by google, these close ai company will undoubtably steal your code, file and data.

strongly suggest put your valuable work on local llm.

rhedak • 16 hours ago

Honestly with AI getting smarter it feels like these kind of attacks will only increase...

acedTrex • 17 hours ago

Thankfully coding is solved everyone

goingbananas • 12 hours ago

I chuckled at this, thanks

villgax • 18 hours ago

What I dont understand is why the hell do these extensions & clis need to update every damn day. clearly there's no new models everyday, what the actual f.

meindnoch • 17 hours ago

Because we need velocity. If we don't have velocity, we die.

hem777 • 20 hours ago

”I've confirmed Binance use Claude Code with this extension.”

fn-mote • 20 hours ago

^^ Had to verify that this was a real quote from the chain and not a joke. It is accurate.

paaloeye • 18 hours ago

Another reason for not using VS Code and derived and all their mess of extensions. I'm glad running Claude Code in Ghostty/Terminal is not affected.

jedisct1 • 19 hours ago

Keep sending all your secrets and giving full control of your devices to Anthropic.

This is fine.

syngrog66 • 4 hours ago

Anthropic is a malware vendor (on many levels of abstraction): confirmed. But plenty of evidence visible to public eye, prior.

I forbid all-things-Anthropic on any machine I control, as of many months ago. In my private vendor "DNP" blacklist. Its designed as bait for the gullible or ignorant: the telltales are all right there. (Just like OpenClaw, for example.)

iJohnDoe • 6 hours ago

> I was working on the clearly mistaken impression that "Made by Anthropic" in the cursor store meant that the artifact had been signed by Anthropic. If that is not the case, then two party's need to get their act together:

Whoa! WTF? I always thought those were official releases by the companies. That's the only reason I trusted them. How is it possible they are being branded as official releases?

xteam • 19 hours ago

♟

cookiengineer • 14 hours ago

It's dangerous to go alone, take this [1]

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/check-claude-code-exfil

stopsayingsorry • 19 hours ago

Imagine backdooring 50+ million installs.

Hats off to the hackers.

stbenjam • 19 hours ago

5,000*

gcoakes • 19 hours ago

I think that's just the number Cursor has telemetry on. I think there's multiple distribution locations.

misnome • 19 hours ago

5000 is the cursor number for people on the cursor version of the store, not the VSCode store.

paxy • 16 hours ago

The VSCode store wasn't hacked.

try-working • 18 hours ago

"Software is solved. Bugs are not yet solved"

marklykit • 1 hour ago

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felixrieseberg • 17 hours ago

Felix from Anthropic here.

We’re working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn’t a compromise of Anthropic’s systems or employee laptops. A malicious actor used access to Cursor’s marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn’t build or publish. The versions on our official channels are not affected and this only impacts Cursor users.

cryptonym • 16 hours ago

> A malicious actor used access to Cursor’s marketplace

How did they get access to this?

Handy-Man • 16 hours ago

Ask Cursor team?

cryptonym • 15 hours ago

Let's say Anthropic has been impersonated and they are not at fault. I'd expect Cursor to provide information to them about this, and Anthropic being able to comment.

Btw, if you got any insights, you are more than welcome to share.

ravivarmat • 1 hour ago

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MaxQuimby • 3 hours ago

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hmokiguess • 16 hours ago

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ntsili • 5 hours ago

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arbor-group • 17 hours ago

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primce1 • 19 hours ago

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FortHire • 17 hours ago

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umowbray • 17 hours ago

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ankur_misra • 14 hours ago

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sirnicolaz • 18 hours ago

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READ_A_BOOK • 19 hours ago

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aidotguru • 18 hours ago

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throwaway919233 • 9 hours ago

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coconut-13 • 16 hours ago

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soundworlds • 10 hours ago

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sick_of_slop • 19 hours ago

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sarmedshafi • 17 hours ago

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ath3nd • 9 hours ago

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nickphx • 19 hours ago

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xteam • 19 hours ago

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poelzi • 19 hours ago

I guess, this is why I'm building tix.im ...