A group of Israeli researchers explored the security of the Visual Studio Code marketplace and managed to "infect" over 100 organizations by trojanizing a copy of the popular 'Dracula Official theme to include risky code. Further research into the VSCode Marketplace found thousands of extensions with millions of installs.
Ah, the Microsoft tradition of always having the wrong priorities.
They didn’t put “AI” in the subject line of the emails, so Microsoft doesn’t care…
I wouldn’t be too hard on Microsoft. The requirement to curate public package repositories only emerged somewhat recently, as demonstrated by the likes of npm, and putting in place a process to audit and pull out offending packages might not be straight-forward.
I think the main take on this is to learn the lesson that it is not safe to install random software you come across online. Is this lesson new, though?
I think people often have a vaguely formed assumption that plugins are somehow sandboxed and less dangerous. But that all depends on the software hosting the plugin. There was a recent issue with a KDE theme wiping a user’s files which brought this to light. We can’t assume plugins or themes are any less dangerous than random executables.