Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace (phorion.io)

890 pointsby _challa day ago529 comments

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

felixrieseberg 20 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.

ashishb 19 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.

hobo123 19 hours ago

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

ashishb 19 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.

hobo123 18 hours ago

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

JoBrad 16 hours ago

I’m fine with that. I use a top-level directory for all of my code, and restricting extension access to that directory is a great idea.

ashishb 8 hours ago

It is good but you still don't want long running background tasks.

When you run a linter, for example, then it should stop executing cider once it stops. And not be able to spawn long-running background tasks for infiltration.

none_to_remain 14 hours ago

If all the code and data eventually move into the dedicated user account, why wouldn't it also eventually move into the container/vm?

ashishb 10 hours ago

Don't mount all your code every time.

E.g. when working on a frontend only project, you don't need to mount the backend directory and vice-versa. This limits the attack radius.

no-name-here 18 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?

fg137 17 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.

idontwantthis 16 hours ago

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

fishfasell 19 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 19 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 19 hours ago

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

no-name-here 18 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

JeremyNT 19 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.

nikanj 19 hours ago

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

lifeisloving 19 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.

user43928 19 hours ago

Cursor made Grok Bot and is working on the Grok models.

I wouldn't say it's obviously unsuccessful.

quantumwannabe 17 hours ago

The team behind Cursor and their data were worth $60 billion to Musk, not the app itself.

criley2 16 hours ago

Considering that the biggest and most successful play for SpaceXAI in the AI space has been "Sell compute to Anthropic" I also wouldn't say that all of the grok junk has been obviously successful, either.

sunaookami 19 hours ago

>Perhaps it will be the death knell

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

airhangerf15 19 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.

anygivnthursday 17 hours ago

> I'm still surprised people use CrowdStrike

I mean, LastPass is still in business...

numbsafari 17 hours ago

> > I'm still surprised people use CrowdStrike

> I mean, LastPass is still in business...

I mean, Microsoft is still experiencing massive growth.

kemotep 17 hours ago

If Microsoft was any good the entire IT industry would collapse. Millions of high paying careers are built on decades of fixing the garbage that comes out of Redmond. Probably a trillion dollars worth of businesses selling software and support to companies running Microsoft would evaporate as soon as Microsoft doesn’t continue their current efforts.

nightski 16 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".

JoBrad 16 hours ago

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

lfglopes 15 hours ago

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

"Do you use crowdstrike falcon?"

Melatonic 15 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

tredre3 13 hours ago

> They recompiled it for EVERY kernel release of every supported distribution (they had never heard of DPMS apparently)

Neither have I, I think you goofed up on your acronyms? For a driver as embedded as crowdstrike you need to recompile, there's no other way around it. Linux doesn't provide anything stable to target and a shim won't cut it in this case.

> the service ran as root, it UPDATED ITS OWN BINARIES as root!

Would you prefer if Linux allowed local users to replace the kernel and/or its modules without root? What kind of faux-outrage is this?

darkwi11ow 12 hours ago

I think gp meant DKMS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support). It allows for things like using same proprietary device drivers across many Linux kernels.

burger_moon 13 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.

asveikau 14 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.

Aboutplants 19 hours ago

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

gpm 19 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 9 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 19 hours ago

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

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

bhouston 16 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.

satellites 15 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 7 hours ago

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

elevation 19 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.

ipsento606 19 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?

wky 19 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 17 hours ago

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

ddworken 19 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 18 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.

aaronrobinson an hour ago

Huh?

slim 4 minutes ago

He's implying that twitter will shadow ban this info to let anthropic reputation be damaged for a few more days

bostik 15 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.

nitrix 13 hours ago

You're confused. It's not Anthropic's responsibility to monitor and fix everything that's said correctly or incorrectly about them. They're doing excellent given what they're capable to do in this situation.

giancarlostoro 10 hours ago

Yeah, but every now and then someone working for Anthropic tweets something, everyone quotes it as gospel, but there's no official statement anywhere on their website. They have the worst communication ever, it's one of the things I like the least about Anthropic.

stingraycharles 10 hours ago

It’s strictly speaking not their responsibility, but it is something that they should do if they want to help their customers.

In general, they need to make a really big post somewhere that’s not a HN comment that this was in fact a compromise of the Cursor marketplace, not an employee’s machine, because they’re getting a lot of (unjustified) bad PR.

dboreham 9 hours ago

No but their no doubt highly paid lawyers should have sought relief from their trademark being infringed, and demanded the extension was pulled long ago.

fn-mote 9 hours ago

They didn't because they were benefitting from the situation. (Users got to use their preferred tooling.) Until they weren't. That makes it more their problem, in my mind.

bg24 9 hours ago

You run a business and have millions of high paying customers. Someone happens to use your brand to market things and create harm for the society. Legally, you may be clean. But, your first line of defense is not "it is not my problem".

bagels 5 minutes ago

They're not obligated to. I'm not obligated to be a customer.

troupo 11 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.

ruined 18 hours ago

there is NO LEGIT v2.1.313

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

sarjann 14 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 14 hours ago

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

qwrkll 19 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-...

perching_aix 19 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.

Handy-Man 19 hours ago

313 was never released lol https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases

ddworken 19 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 19 hours ago

Why was the npm version 2.1.313 yanked?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anthropic-ai/claude-code?acti...

ddworken 18 hours ago

skinfaxi 15 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 19 hours ago

smooth sloperators, smooooooooth sloperattorrrrrssss

jitbit 18 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 17 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 15 hours ago

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

Which is exactly the opposite of what happened today.

drdrey 10 hours ago

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

bagacrap 10 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 14 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.

nailer 15 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?

saidnooneever 15 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 15 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 15 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

saidnooneever 2 hours ago

people have varying degrees of sensitivity and also different defaults when it comes to interpreting phrasing depending on their native language, cultural expressions, current emotional state and more.

its a bad thing to assume that everyone is the same here and have some default reactions.

these are people who in name of company are responding to customer concerns, unlike us who are simply commenting on stuff. its a different context to communicate from.

what do you think will be nhe result if they word things clumsily, people get angry, and then stop their subscriptions. Its not a handy thing to be doing. Big tech can be harsh, ive seen people sacked for less.

snayan 22 minutes ago

Do you have any visibility into why or how only is viewed negatively by some populations? I am still struggling to connect that dot, and I am a native english speaker. But I suspect that may be part of the problem? Are their some languages where the translation of only isn't parsed quite the same or something?

saidnooneever 2 hours ago

hey, personally i dont mind either, perhaps its because different words are used to frame things differently in different languages. A lot of people here type english but aren't.

I just said this as some unsolicited advice since out of experience i know it makes. a big difference to choose the right phrasing when speaking to people from around the globe.

f0e4c2f7 13 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.

tzone 13 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.

IshKebab 13 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.

tehlike 13 hours ago

+1.

baxtr 13 hours ago

HN has a dedicated upvote functionality.

theteapot 13 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

ethanzh 13 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.

junofan 12 hours ago

It’s like if 5,000 people bought iPhones at Costco and they all exploded, and Apple says “well we didn’t sell them.” Sure, but maybe not the perfect thing to communicate immediately.

weego 12 hours ago

It's literally not like that at all.

If Costco made iPhones under license from Apple outside of the Apple supply chain and they all exploded, while the Apple name is involved they have no direct liability or responsibility.

daynthelife 11 hours ago

Legal responsibility, no. But apple's reputation would nevertheless be on the line. Is this situation I would expect Apple to pursue legal action against Costco for reputational damage, as I would Anthropic Cursor.

true_religion 12 hours ago

No, it's like 5,000 people bought something that Costco called the iPhone but really was EvilPhone Max+ by EvilCorp. Costco should be on the hook for accepting the phones without properly checking they weren't bombs in disguise.

Apple would be 100% right to say "they're not our phone, we didn't make them, the branding was a lie."

Of course if Cursor actually has a direct connection with Anthropic, and Anthropic lost control of their keys... it's a different story and their employee is just obfuscating up there.

plaguuuuuu 12 hours ago

It's a lot more like a bunch of people bought Cisco networking equipment and then the NSA secretly intercepted shipments, implanted surveillance backdoors, then resealed the boxes and sent them on to unsuspecting overseas targets.

fn-mote 10 hours ago

If there are no seals at all then it’s hard to argue this is the correct analogy.

And there was no interception. At the very strongest, the bad guys convinced Cisco to ship the stuff, and Cisco is saying it’s not their responsibility.

They definitely shipped something they didn’t build or check.

kji 12 hours ago

This is misleading; a better analogy would be if someone swapped out all iPhones in the store with fake ones.

quietbritishjim 10 hours ago

In this situation, Cursor did not make any reasonable attempts to check this extension really was from anthropic.

So for the analogy, it really is like Costco didn't make any attempt to check they were buying actual iPhones.

yardstick 9 hours ago

A better analogy would be to say Anthropic must register their domain with every TLD available, to prevent someone cybersquatting it. I see Claude.org.nz is available.

abofh 12 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 11 hours ago

This is wrong.

d0mine 12 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).

consumer451 13 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.

AtNightWeCode 12 hours ago

That is simply not how software works.

munk-a 11 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 8 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?

darkwi11ow 12 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.

cmiles74 11 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.

adriand 10 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.

dboreham 9 hours ago

No, you misunderstand (not surprising since 99% of the coverage on this story is wrong). What happened is: someone published an extension called "Anthropic.claude-code". That someone was not Anthropic and never was Anthropic. They just used the string "Anthropic" in the name of their extension. The comment you are responding to is saying that Cursor (the organization that manages the extension marketplace) should have prohibited someone from using a popular AI lab's name in the title of their mystery meat extension. They're probably right about that.

no-name-here 8 hours ago

I think GP’s objection to the claim that Cursor allowing non-Anthropic to do it for 11 hours was partly “an Anthropic problem.”

bagels 6 minutes ago

It is an Anthropic problem. It's also a Cursor problem.

cmiles74 8 hours ago

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

telephone3 5 hours ago

I mean the initial translation kind of works too.

ghshephard 10 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 10 hours ago

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

Rohansi 10 hours ago

Isn't the Cursor Marketplace separate from VSCode's? Maybe it's as simple as someone impersonating Anthropic because they never registered there? Code signing alone wouldn't help in cases like that.

yubblegum 9 hours ago

Vendor A publishes a public key on their site for authenticating any signature. There is an entire subset of cryptography dedicated to addressing these needs. This is just yet another software player, Cursor, taking the absolutely easy no effort path because otherwise they would be, I don't know, "losers". I mean only losers would setup a basic authenticated provinance for bits of code they are pushing to the world to be executed by all and sundry. Really, this profession has become a complete clown show.

Rohansi 9 hours ago

I don't think even VSCode does this. Probably not even any package managers I know of? Code signing, yes, but not for organization verification? It's pretty much like a username - anyone can claim it if it is unclaimed?

edit: VSCode has a verified marker for publishers but I don't know how that works or if Cursor does the same.

yunnpp 7 hours ago

This is a solved problem, just look at how EFF's certbot works. You cannot just claim that you are porn.com unless you put a payload there that matches what the bot expects.

Rohansi 5 hours ago

And force everyone who wants to publish an extension to buy and manage a domain name? What if it expires? You're just replacing one set of problems with another.

dkersten 41 minutes ago

You could make it a requirement only for people who want to attribute “made by”. If you publish a no name extension, you could skip it.

skydhash 7 hours ago

> Code signing, yes, but not for organization verification

They don’t do organization verification, but they do verify where code comes from. You may be sure that packages are built by alpine, which made sure that the dist files comes from the sources that the maintainers added, and the latter ensure that the sources are correct. In truth, it’s a very small circle of trust.

still_grokking 6 hours ago

> Really, this profession has become a complete clown show.

Always has been because there is so far zero liability for anything someone programs and distributes commercially. That's the single root cause. If not that software wouldn't be in general such major shit show. What we have is the result of being allowed to throw out even the most toxic shit out without any consequences if it causes damage, no mater how large the damage is. Software companies caused so far over the decades likely hundreds of billions, or even a few trillion damages in sum, yet nobody responsible ever got the bill. It's wild west—since now over 60 years. This has to stop finally!

Let's see where things will move as soon as we have regular product liability for software:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum...

Just a few days left! Looking forward.

rixed 3 hours ago

That, and NIS2. Looks like a good trend, hopefully it's not just protectionism.

still_grokking an hour ago

Well, if something than it's "anti-protectionism".

This is going to cause some major argument between the EU and the US, maybe even a trade war. Trouble is already underway:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-lawmakers-urge-t...

Despite that I also think that this is the right and long overdue move on the EU side. We need to break the basic pattern that nobody cares as long as the responsible effectively never get the bill when they mess up.

Software is "Unsafe at Any Speed" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed ] to bring a striking analogy — even we have since about 60 years the tech to build software which provably (in the mathematical sense) matches its specification. Still what you have on the market is utter garbage, and instead of getting better it gets currently actually worse with lowering the garbage quality level even more with "AI" slop. That EU legislation could become the escape hatch; that's why I'm looking forward.

duskdozer an hour ago

I'm having trouble understanding what effects that directive could have. Liability under what circumstances and to what degree?

LooseMarmoset 9 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.

wombatpm 5 hours ago

Is there finally a use for blockchain?

luipugs 5 hours ago

No, that is already solved by gpg.

Stop trying to make blockchain happen, it's not going to happen.

chaostheory 5 hours ago

Using it for voting would probably be useful for the blockchain, but then the downside would be the potential loss of privacy.

jimmby654 8 hours ago

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

bg24 9 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.

still_grokking 6 hours ago

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

Rapzid 5 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?

jonas21 17 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 a day 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?

iugtmkbdfil834 a day ago

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

darkwi11ow a day 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 21 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 21 hours ago

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

stingraycharles 21 hours ago

Wasn’t Elon Musk shouting a few days ago that neoclouds are going to crash, the money dried up and that SpaceX was the last company with the opportunity to raise more money?

I think you’re giving Musk too much credit.

kirth_gersen 20 hours ago

True, but there are other people working at the companies that probably own stock in both their own company and some of the others...if you believe that this is the future, you'd be a fool to buy non-AI tech stocks, right?

chrisgarand 20 hours ago

Neoclouds aren't Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. People aren't going to re-value value SpaceX on CoreWeave's success.

SpaceX will be re-valued on Anthropic's, or OpenAI's success, he, and his people are smart enough to understand this.

alpha_squared 20 hours ago

Didn't SpaceX partially admit they're a neocloud in their S-1?

extraextra 19 hours ago

He specifically said that lender money dried up for neocloud companies that don't have other sources of income

SpaceX obviously has multiple sources of income, not just data center rents

chrisgarand 18 hours ago

They do have their own segment that is considered neocloud (data centers for compute), but they're mostly/fully used up with their own, and Anthropic's compute.

When he was talking about neoclouds, he was talking about the smaller guys who are getting bullied by vendors (mainly Nvidia) to buy as much hardware as possible (more than they want to). They paid more, for more, and needed to take on more debt, to end up (currently anyways) being well below capacity.

Over the next few years, unless growth keeps up (and probably accelerates), they'll need to sell, or restructure.

The buildouts by Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are currently safe. The neoclouds that they've signed contracts with, are safe, but based on reports, that's roughly 60% of current capacity (it varies by report, but they're all under 75%).

bix6 20 hours ago

Somebody doesn’t want anybody to have a bigger IPO than them.

lkbm 19 hours ago

The person at the top refers to Anthropic as "Misanthropic". It seems unlikely that they're also intentionally lying about this to protect Anthropic's interests.

Your conspiracy theory needs some work.

AdrianCX 21 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

LtWorf 10 hours ago

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

slashdave 10 hours ago

Wait... and people use this?

skinfaxi 9 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 9 hours ago

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

WarmWash 19 hours ago

It's annoying how fast people run to conspiracy.

jorisw 19 hours ago

And pretend to know and understand the ties between big names

tclancy 17 hours ago

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

no-name-here 18 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 21 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 21 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.

cookiengineer 20 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 15 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.

tekawade 20 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 18 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 17 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 18 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 8 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.

ddworken 18 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 17 hours ago

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

john_strinlai 17 hours ago

>the corporate laptop

an anthropic laptop? why are you sketpical?

abirch 17 hours ago

Exactly and why wouldn't the thieves publish to the official VS Code or Open VSX market places?

crooked-v 13 hours ago

Because what they had was some kind of admin access to Cursor's mirror of OpenVSX, and not anything else.

quietbritishjim 10 hours ago

I guess they're skeptical because it seems incredible that having access to Cursor's marketplace would allow you to publish updates to a different organisation's extensions.

In fairness, that is very surprising.

dannyw 9 hours ago

Reading between the lines, it seems like Anthropic isn't involved in the "official by Anthropic" extension at all.

Cursor seems to be scraping extensions from Microsoft's marketplace, and repackaging it and keeping the metadata.

stingraycharles 8 hours ago

Wow if that is the case… Cursor certainly needs to communicate much more clearly that Anthropic wasn’t involved in this at all.

mike_d 2 hours ago

Cursor is now Grok, so are you really surprised?

yubblegum 21 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 21 hours ago

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

lesspassiveobse 21 hours ago

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

JoBrad 16 hours ago

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

xx_ns a day 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...

thevinter a day ago

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

Hackbraten 21 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 20 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.

xx_ns 21 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.

tveita 21 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 19 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.

mrweasel a day 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 a day ago

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

mrweasel a day 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.

toyg 21 hours ago

> You could download the extension, diff it against the previous version and read all the code.

This would actually be an exceptionally good use-case for AI. You don't need a super-duper frontier model to download a bit of source-available code and check for suspicious signs, any cheap model would do well enough. Heck, it's effectively virus scanning, we've had that for decades.

jeromechoo 21 hours ago

The CTA flavor of the year for dev tools is cURLing some arbitrary install script and run it immediately which always sounded ridiculous to me. If instead that script first pipes into claude -p for a basic vulnerability scan before continuing, I would be delighted.

heartbreak 20 hours ago

Hopefully a well-sandboxed claude -p.

jbvlkt 20 hours ago

LLM are not designed for that. Unless prompt injection is really solved I would avoid showing LLM untrusted code.

no-name-here 18 hours ago

Cursor explicitly claims "Before an extension is shown in search or served as a download, Cursor runs automated malware and supply-chain analysis using commercial security tooling. Extensions that fail review are blocked. Cursor also monitors extension-ecosystem threat intelligence and updates its blocklist over time."

However, the bad extension was live for ~11 hours.

true_religion 12 hours ago

That's a testament to the strength of their so called "commercial quality" security tooling.

nijave 9 hours ago

Norton Anti Virus...

DanielHB 21 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

mrweasel 20 hours ago

Would that really help, if you install the extension it's running in the VSCodium instance on your machine... or is it running in the vscode-server?

DanielHB 20 hours ago

Most extensions run in vscodium-server, extensions run either as "Local Extensions" that run on the host and "Remote Extensions" that run on the guest. You can clearly see in the UI which ones run where.

I only have a single "Local Extension" and it is open-remote-ssh itself.

Of course anything you put into the container can be compromised, like git ssh keys or cloud provider keys/auth-tokens. But at least it keeps your PC from becoming a botnet and your browser credentials out of reach. If you have a Containerfile/Dockerfile with everything you need you can quickly wipe everything and re-create your dev environment from scratch (which I do every once in a while), wiping any malware you might have gotten in there.

When running inside a container you can do some nifty things like keeping root directories immutable. I have been meaning to make some user directories immutable in my container but just been too lazy to do it.

dash-44 20 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).

misnome a day ago

The screenshot is of the official marketplace

ddworken 19 hours ago

xx_ns 17 hours ago

Thanks for clarifying!

arm32 13 hours ago

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

zbentley 9 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 10 hours ago

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

helsinkiandrew a day 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 19 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 18 hours ago

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

xvector 9 hours ago

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

orlp 21 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"...

CoastalCoder 21 hours ago

Does anyone know Microsoft's justification for that policy?

bikeshaving 20 hours ago

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

masfuerte 19 hours ago

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

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

seanw444 13 hours ago

All I have to say is: lmao

IshKebab 20 hours ago

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

dgellow 20 hours ago

Wtf. That’s its own scandal

delis-thumbs-7e 20 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.

dcrazy 20 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.

1shooner a day 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 5 hours ago

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

anon-3988 a day 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?

staminade a day 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 21 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.

rcxdude 2 hours ago

It's a little harder when it's not part of the supply chain that is passing through their organisation.

Den_VR a day ago

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

snaking0776 a day ago

In at least one case they were! https://cybernews.com/ai-news/grok-build-git-repository-uplo...

origini 21 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

raxxorraxor 21 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?

deadbabe 21 hours ago

No but we use MCP so we’re fine.

novafunc 21 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.

wolttam 20 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 20 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

valleyer 20 hours ago

Heuristically: https://web.archive.org/web/20250622061208/https://www.idont...

vladvasiliu 20 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.

zahlman 10 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.

magnio 21 hours ago

> Who's checking?

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

palata 21 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.

knottn 21 hours ago

Maybe it’s easier to outsource.

jimbokun 19 hours ago

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

seanw444 13 hours ago

That's what reputations are for.

anon-3988 7 hours ago

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

TheCapn 19 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.

palata 18 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".

chasd00 17 hours ago

I wouldn't hold regular engineers in such high regard. I know plenty of EEs, MEs and CEs that don't really give a f** about anything except a paycheck same as software developers.

palata 17 hours ago

Agreed. And let's not forget that those are engineers who develop stuff like electronic cigarettes or... well... bombs.

darkwi11ow 21 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.

hangrybear666 21 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.

rietta 20 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 20 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 :)

rietta 20 hours ago

Yup, I give them a custom entry in ~/.ssh/config like:

``` host claudebox hostname 192.168.122.105 user developer IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa ```

``` host codexbox hostname 192.168.122.106 user developer IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa ```

I drop only my public key inside the VM. Then I set up the ~/Projects folder with the code the bot is working on any any authorized samples.

Then in my local on my host clone of the repository, I add another remote like

``` git remote add codexbox ssh://codexbox/home/developer/Projects/hello-world ```

Then git push codexbox.

Then I just SSH in or use the vm gui and interact with the agent there. I like to keep it running in byobu so I can remote in more easily when I am on the laptop out and about.

skinfaxi 9 hours ago

Do you have any wrappers or scripts to facilitate this?

zahlman 10 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.

gexla an hour ago

Wow, interesting issue. An issue with a VSC extension. And the path for this issue to even be a thing possibly a weakness in the way the extensions marketplace works (so frustrating that marketplaces and app stores are like spam folders in that you have loads of entries attempting to convince you that they are something they aren't.) And I often forget that Cursor even has an IDE, and that the IDE is their own release of VSC. I remember being frustrated that Cursor didn't support some of the extensions I wanted to use, so I never bothered with it. Now I barely open an editor anyway. Odd how this has been progressing.

paxy 18 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?

Aboutplants 18 hours ago

Yup

arm32 13 hours ago

A beautiful thing

zahlman 10 hours ago

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

setnone an hour ago

> tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn’t build or publish

it looks like anthropic folks in this thread are throwing excuses instead of allocating one оr two FTE to make sure this will not happen

spdustin 13 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 a day ago

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

_heimdall a day ago

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

nannal 21 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.

Geezus_42 21 hours ago

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

Filligree 21 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.

jmbwell 20 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

stogot 20 hours ago

This is where I silently found gold. All those old TODO when if I have time in retirement

nannal 19 hours ago

I've got a whole heap of unfinished side projects that I'm digging through

codazoda 20 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.

InsidiousWombat 19 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 7 hours ago

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

cedws 18 hours ago

How does it resolve the prompt injection?

jacquesm 19 hours ago

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

eviks a day ago

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

MisterTea 21 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.

claytongulick 20 hours ago

Damn, thank you for that.

Sums up my feelings of the last few years nicely.

vintermann 20 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.)

bagacrap 19 hours ago

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

ben_w 19 hours ago

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

Good that you said so, this is annoyingly plausible.

Hackbraten 21 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:

viraptor 20 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.

cryptonym 20 hours ago

> someone got the credentials

> No review system at anthropic has seen this

Weird flex

viraptor 19 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.

cryptonym 19 hours ago

Arguably, your security shouldn't stop at internal code review and should aim at protecting key distribution platforms credentials and assets that are pushed to your users.

viraptor 19 hours ago

Yeah, it shouldn't. But at that point it's not "Why didn't Claude detect the hack" but rather "Why isn't Claude running all processes at your company autonomously", which is a bit silly. We know it isn't and it's not at that level, because anthropic employs engineers.

cryptonym 19 hours ago

> at that point it's not "Why didn't Claude detect the hack" but rather "Why isn't Claude running all processes at your company autonomously", which is a bit silly.

Would be nice to have some words from them understanding how they manage this, what went wrong, how they'll prevent this in the future. We don't have any RCA, maybe there is little to nothing to blame them.

Not sure they'd share your views on using Claude for security policy/coverage being silly.

unshavedyak 19 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.

InsidiousWombat 19 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 19 hours ago

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

eviks 19 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 13 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.

jacquesm 19 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.

henearkr a day ago

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

darkwi11ow a day 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.

tyingq a day 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 19 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 14 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

AdrianCX 21 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 21 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.

AdrianCX 21 hours ago

Then why even allow employees to use that?

Binance got a pretty expensive lesson if that was the cause for their recent hack

darkwi11ow 21 hours ago

There is no alternative really. Cursor was the market leader in LLM-assisted IDE experience before SpaceX acquisition, though Elon nerfed the product a lot in recent months. And there is still no good alternative to it. Google tries to compete via Antigravity, but that also uses OpenVSX. I myself use Cursor and use Claude there installed via OpenVSX, and was not affected only thanks to my laziness (I saw upgrade button, but became distracted and did not click). I hope this situation will become a trigger to improve OpenVSX security.

AdrianCX 21 hours ago

Why not use claude code directly?

Why risk getting compromised like that?

darkwi11ow 21 hours ago

Well for me, as developer on a modern stack, there is always some risk involved. If not from agentic tools, then the package registries are compromised left and right, so it all comes down to mitigating the risk. I use Claude, Codex and Cursor/SpaceX agents, and Cursor comes very convenient to have all three in a single interface. Also I still code manually especially when prototyping, so having an IDE helps with it as well. I knew about OpenVSX situation with the search, so when installing extensions I always did triple-checking to verify the extension being really submitted by upstream and not by squatter; but now given upgrades can also deliver a compromise I am thinking of developing an extension that will act in similar manner to pnpm minimum release age.

darkwi11ow 16 hours ago

To anyone who might be reading this exchange, actually there is recently added builtin setting for delayed auto-update, `extensions.autoUpdateDelay`, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/316867 and https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/321039

tyingq 20 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.

Lazare 20 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.

albert_e 20 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 20 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

philipwhiuk 17 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"

cautiouscat 17 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

K0nserv a day 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 a day 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 21 hours ago

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

mirashii 20 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 20 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.

mirashii 20 hours ago

You’re right, I read too quickly.

sunaookami 20 hours ago

No worries, it's very unexpected. I just remembered because I did the same thing last week and was surprised it worked.

XCSme 19 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 5 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 10 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 21 hours ago

Oh god... this needs more attention

An official announcement from Anthropic would be nice!

stingraycharles 21 hours ago

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

thewhitetulip 15 hours ago

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

FergusArgyll 15 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 8 hours ago

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

invidiouslove12 28 minutes ago

oh! thanks for the imformation!

richrichardsson a day 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 a day 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 19 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 18 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 21 hours ago

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

eviks a day 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

kamban a day ago

Yet, they managed to screw up.

iugtmkbdfil834 a day 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 a day 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.

mirekrusin 21 hours ago

To be fair it’s not like screwups were not happening before, but if you move 100x faster and are 50x more secure than before you’re still 2x more exposed.

jimbokun 19 hours ago

Yes, bug count is roughly linear in the number of lines of code.

atrokhymchuk 21 hours ago

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

btown 21 hours ago

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

samiv 21 hours ago

Just put gastown on it!

stymaar 21 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 21 hours ago

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

prologic 20 hours ago

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

stymaar 20 hours ago

Github's uptime getting stray bullets, I see.

malfist 18 hours ago

Maybe is a security measure, can't hack something if it's never available

tiahura 20 hours ago

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

Or, is this FUD?

bix6 20 hours ago

https://genai.owasp.org/2026/07/08/genai-and-agentic-ai-expl...

lynndotpy 20 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.

skinfaxi 20 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 19 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 18 hours ago

https://xkcd.com/1161/

Cthulhu_ 21 hours ago

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

bayindirh 20 hours ago

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

alansaber 20 hours ago

Shaka, when the context compacted

thatsabadlook 21 hours ago

[flagged]

dgellow 20 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

IndeanCondor 20 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.

b112 20 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 20 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?

OoooooooO 20 hours ago

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

done_lurking 19 hours ago

Not gp, but I think the point was that no one would defend those mistakes. The post gp is replying to is someone trying to excuse Anthropic for such a mistake. The expectation is that people should ask for consequences, not make excuses on behalf of the company.

dgellow 19 hours ago

You’re projecting, I didn’t excuse anything

done_lurking 18 hours ago

What word would you prefer I use instead of "excuse"?

dgellow 19 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

Tarean 20 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.

alansaber 20 hours ago

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

paxy 20 hours ago

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

strix_varius 19 hours ago

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

paxy 19 hours ago

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

alienbaby 17 hours ago

nobody is saying anthropic was hacked?

paxy 17 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 18 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.)

ale42 a day 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?

_hmj 20 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 18 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 9 hours ago

compromised extension then backdoors your code anyway

throwitaway222 14 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 14 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...