[isidorn]

Hi - Isidor here from the VS Code team.

A member of the community did a deep security analysis of the extension and found multiple red flags that indicate malicious intent and reported this to us. Our security researchers at Microsoft confirmed this claims and found additional suspicious code.

We banned the publisher from the VS Marketplace and removed all of their extensions and uninstalled from all VS Code instances that have this extension running. For clarity - the removal had nothing to do about copyright/licenses, only about potential malicious intent.

Expect an announcement here with more details soon https://github.com/microsoft/vsmarketplace/

As a reminder, the VS Marketplace continuously invests in security. And more about extension runtime trust can be found in this article https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/extension-runtime-...

Thank you!

[danhau]

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

I had to manually delete the extension's folder in %USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions and delete the entry from the json (%USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions\extensions.json).

VSCode 1.97.2, commit e54c774e0add60467559eb0d1e229c6452cf8447

[isidorn]

Thank you for letting us know. We are investigating.

[shdw]

Thank you man, I was getting nuts here trying to uninstall this crap but unable.

[vlovich123]

Help me square this circle:

> A member of the community did a deep security analysis of the extension and found multiple red flags that indicate malicious intent and reported this to us.

> As a reminder, the VS Marketplace continuously invests in security

If you’re relying on the community to alert you to the issues in the marketplace, perhaps you’re not investing enough in auditing popular extensions yourself?

I would also suggest that the trust model for VSCode is fundamentally broken - you’re running arbitrary third party code on client machines without any form of sandboxing. This is a level of security you would not deploy into Azure, so why is “run arbitrary 3p code on someone else’s machine” appropriate for VSCode?

While I appreciate the work that the VSCode team does and I use it, the lack of any form of sandboxing has always bothered me.

[CodeWriter23]

PSA: every package you install from any package manager from browser extensions to npm/composer etc presents the risk of malware. Because the open source community lacks the financial resources to vet every single version of every package. Demanding this level of security from software provided at no cost that relies on open contributions is wholly unreasonable. If you need that, buy an IDE from a company financially capable of ensuring security and accept the limitations of their offering.

Mitigations like running in a VM might protect your dev workstation. But not code you put into production that relies on third parties.

[bogwog]

I was going to point this weird part of their comment too.

Reminder that the Open-VSX extension registry exists: https://open-vsx.org

Idk if they removed the malicious theme (or if they have it at all), but if MS isn't doing anything beyond just responding to user reports, you might as well switch to an open registry that probably does the same level of security work, and avoid giving them yet another monopoly.

[nmstoker]

Remember, this is Microsoft! A friend told me of a fairly major corporate firm that found MSFT had arbitrarily pushed an AI tool to run on their SharePoint, scooping up site data outside of any formal agreement to do so. MSFT are no doubt covered by a general agreement but this seems underhand/inept and yet a remarkably common flaw in their approach (I've seen similar behaviour with Teams apps)

[ajross]

> If you’re relying on the community to alert you to the issues in the marketplace, perhaps you’re not investing enough in auditing popular extensions yourself?

I think that's sort of unfair. Of course MS should be relying on the community! That's arguably the best single practice for detecting these kinds of attacks in open source code. Objectively it works rather better even than walled garden environments like the iOS/Android apps stores (which have to be paired with extensive app-level sandboxing and permissions management, something that editor extensions can't use by definition).

The reference case for best practice here is actually the big Linux distros. Red Hat and Canonical and Debian have a long, long track record of shipping secure software. And they did it not on the back of extensive in-house auditing but by relying on the broader community to pre-validate a list of valuable/useful/secure/recommended software which they can then "package".

MS's flaw here, which is shared by NPM and PyPI et. al., is that they want to be a package repository without embracing that kind of upstream community validation. Software authors can walk right in and start distributing junk even though no one's ever heard of them. That has to stop. We need to get back to "we only distribute stuff other people are already using".

[davely]

> you’re running arbitrary third party code on client machines without any form of sandboxing. This is a level of security you would not deploy into Azure, so why is “run arbitrary 3p code on someone else’s machine” appropriate for VSCode?

More and more, I am starting to think I need to run my development environment (for both work and personal projects) in a VM.

I am on MacOS, so UTM or Parallels would work pretty well I think. Sadly, I think my work explicitly forbids us from running VMs or accessing our services from them.

[fennecfoxy]

Lmao why should they have to spend money auditing random 3rd party extensions that you choose to install? VSC is free, we're not paying for it.

[paulddraper]

> Help me square this circle

Sure. As a general rule, you get what you pay for.

[anakaine]

You might need to chase down reuploads, too.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=t3dotgg....

[isidorn]

Thanks. Our security researchers will review this today and we might take it down. We reached out to the new author and he does not have malicious intent, and agreed that we just take down the new extension if we see something is off.

[Lermatroid]

This is a older pinned version before the license and malware stuff started going down afaik

https://youtu.be/3wz7YF2as-c

[rfl890]

Maybe point to the actual reupload instead? https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fanny.vs...

[filiptronicek]

> Expect an announcement here with more details soon https://github.com/microsoft/vsmarketplace/

Hi Isidor, excited for this! At Open VSX, we'd love to take a look and potentially flag the extension as malicious on our side as well. Are you aware of the version range that the malicious code was included in? I'm asking because https://open-vsx.org does not have any version published since the extension went closed-source.

[flutas]

The extension file is still available to download directly from MS.[0]

I downloaded the file, and unzipped it, but on a cursory glance I only see obfuscated code nothing malicious.

[0]: !!!WARNING MAY BE MALICIOUS!!! https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/pu...

[shanselman]

False positives suck, and it hurts when it happens.

The publisher account for Material Theme and Material Theme Icons (Equinusocio) was mistakenly flagged and has now been restored. In the interest of safety, we moved fast and we messed up. We removed these themes because they fired off multiple malware detection indicators inside Microsoft, and our investigation came to the wrong conclusion. We care deeply about the security of the VS Code ecosystem, and acted quickly to protect our users.

I understand that the "Equinusocio" extensions author's frustration and intense reaction, and we hear you. It's bad but sometimes things like this happen. We do our best - we're humans, and we hope to move on from this We will clarify our policy on obfuscated code and we will update our scanners and investigation process to reduce the likelihood of another event like this. These extensions are safe and have been restored for the VS Code community to enjoy.

LINKS: Material Theme https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Equinuso... Material Theme Icons https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Equinuso...

Again, we apologize that the author got caught up in the blast radius and we look forward to their future themes and extensions. We've corresponded with him to make these amends and thanked him for his patience.

Scott Hanselman and the Visual Studio Code Marketplace Team - @shanselman

[solomatov]

Is it possible for you to add color theme/icon theme/keymap only extensions, without any executable code? I think, it will improve the security situation a bit. I don't see why the mentioned kinds of extensions should have any code.

[bagels]

This is really confusing to me. The original discussion was about changing licenses, but somehow (coincidentally?) there was malicious code discovered shortly after? Are these related?

[dark-star]

It's a common theme:

- build an open-source thing

- wait till thousands or millions of people are using it

- change the license and close down the source

- implement malicious code

- push an update

- profit! you now have your malware running on millions of systems

[joshka]

Can you please clarify whether the fork also suffers from the same security issues (or engage the fork's owner to ensure that it doesn't https://github.com/t3dotgg/vsc-material-but-i-wont-sue-you)

[theobr]

Hi, owner of the fork here.

I did a thorough combing of the code base when I forked. Just did another audit and still not seeing anything suspicious. Gutting all of the opencollective and changelog code to be 1000% sure.

[isidorn]

Thanks for flagging it. Our security researchers will analize it and based on their findings we might remove this one as well.

[flutas]

So is there any proof of the malicious code?

The extension file is still available to download directly from MS.[0] (Which, why if you pull it from users are you still allowing downloads first of all.)

I downloaded the file, and unzipped it. On a cursory glance I see obfuscated code but zero "red flag" level code, has anyone seen the malicious code claimed?

[0]: !!!WARNING CLAIMED TO BE MALICIOUS!!! https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/pu...

[ande-mnoc]

Will Microsoft consider adding a permission model for extensions?

[isidorn]

This is tracked in this feature request https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/52116

We do not plan to add a permission model in the next 6 months.

[kobalsky]

Security has been overlooked for way too long for me to trust it at this point.

The only sane way to contain the blast radius is to run is to run code-server in a container (or in a VM) and use it through a browser tab.

Luckily, the UI works perfectly, hotkeys and everything. They did an awesome work there.

[_trampeltier]

There will never be some permission model. Like in VBA there is after all this years nothing. VBA would be much less problematic if you could restrict VBA to just one Excel sheet or so

[balch]

Given that it's been automatically removed from all VS Code instance, is there any way to check if it was previously installed? It's concerning that there's now no way to check if a sytem has been compromised by this

[BtM909]

Doesn't it prompt to uninstall?

[buttercraft]

Just to be clear, which publisher was banned? Maybe I'm being stupid (it's late here) but I'm struggling to track the various parties involved.

Anyway, thank you for the update.

[isidorn]

The publisher Equinusocio was banned.

[bitbasher]

I de-obfuscated most of it and didn't see anything malicious. Was there any particular file that was concerning?

[progbits]

Why was there any obfuscated code in the first place?

[bitbasher]

I missed it-- it's in the release notes file. I uploaded it to pastebin. It does look malicious.

https://pastebin.com/H5QjS4Bt

[WhyNotHugo]

The issue to which op links now yields 404. What's up with that?

[joshka]

https://web.archive.org/web/20250226020241/https://github.co...

[isidorn]

I am in European time and I do not know what happened on that post (since I was sleeping). I assume it were some heated arguments between maintainer and community about license/copyrights/open source maintenance.

[BigParm]

Imagine the amount of infected packages we use every day. Probably 20 different governments see everything we do.

[cratermoon]

why worry about governments so much? You know how many different companies see everything you do? Do you trust all of them?

https://www.wired.com/story/gravy-location-data-app-leak-rtb...

[galagladi]

They are now evading the ban by rebranding the extension to "Fanny Theme": https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fanny.vs...

[preommr]

Is this a troll name? Fanny is a faily well-known slang term[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny#In_slang

[isidorn]

Thank you. We will security audit this extension today and take action if needed.

[stef25]

Correct, the author links to it from his github page https://github.com/equinusocio