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.
Don't worry, it isn't, just a regular Anti-AI clickbait post. A fake Claude Code extension was available on Cursor (not VSCode regular). Uploaded by someone that wasn't Anthropic. 5k Cursor users affected.
It affects their VSCode marketplace extension which in turn affects their cursor extension. Their official published version. This is plenty of reason to panic.
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.
> 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?
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)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"...
We still don’t know exactly what happened, but I publish software to public registries, and supply chain attacks scare the hell out of me. They also frustrate me, because most of the defenses aren't automatic and often really hard to get right. We're really failing as an industry to do better here.
This is why I started to move more and more into my tix.im environment. You can't trust anything anymore - I assume everything is compromised if not proven otherwise.
either the registry is compromised or someone at anthropic got compromised (or did it on purpose to steal crypto). the line in the cursor disclosure about the extension not being developed by anthropic is more confusing than clarifying. amateur hour for these massive corps
> Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
So Cursor is running its own extension repository? Or is this the official VS Code repository and the incident report just happens to focus on Cursor for some reason?
1. If only Cursor Marketplace version was compromised, how was it published in the first place?
2. If the Cursor Marketplace version was released from an "official Anthropic" account, whose to say OpenVSX and/or VSCode versions are not compromised?
The affected versions have been pulled down, so no one really knows. The way I see it, only Cursor has admitted to have been compromised.
VS Code doesn't allow forks to use their marketplace, I think. At least with VSCodium, they don't. I think they even patch a workaround where you could download almost all extensions' .vsix files.
Has anyone managed to confirm the time that the backdoored version was released? None of my machines updated to it, I am wondering if it was saved by a combination of luck and
> This extension is not updated yet because new versions become eligible for automatic update 12 hours after they are published. It will become eligible in 2 hours.
Yes, but they normally have a 12-hour delay (it was 2 hours at the beginning of June and got extended sometime after that, maybe later in June) and require some human action to reload extensions or restart the editor before the new version runs.
I noticed that there was no update yesterday and wondered why. The daily updates are annoying in the base case.
Edited: This update was live for only 11 hours, so hopefully the default delay limited the blast radius, as it is meant to do.
It tells you all you need to know about how unserious these people are about computer security.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50302334 ???
why are you spewing straight up lies?
It obviously doesn't take much to simply add 'just one more feature' that happens to undermine the original purpose of the application.
> 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?
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
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.
https://cursor.com/blog/claude-code-extension-security-notic...
Edit: related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301983
Wtf does that mean.
We probably transfered more code/codebases and company secrets to random endpoints than ever before.
Btw. you could setup a sandbox and limit access
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.
You always do that, right? ...right?
Yeah I sympathize with people saying software developers should not be called engineers too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"...
So Cursor is running its own extension repository? Or is this the official VS Code repository and the incident report just happens to focus on Cursor for some reason?
2. If the Cursor Marketplace version was released from an "official Anthropic" account, whose to say OpenVSX and/or VSCode versions are not compromised?
The affected versions have been pulled down, so no one really knows. The way I see it, only Cursor has admitted to have been compromised.
> This extension is not updated yet because new versions become eligible for automatic update 12 hours after they are published. It will become eligible in 2 hours.
I noticed that there was no update yesterday and wondered why. The daily updates are annoying in the base case.
Edited: This update was live for only 11 hours, so hopefully the default delay limited the blast radius, as it is meant to do.
Hats off to the hackers.