FYI to all the VS Code peeps out there that malicious extensions can gain access to secrets stored by other VS Code extensions as well as the tokens used by VS Code for Microsoft/Github.

I really don’t understand how Microsoft’s official stance on this is that this is working as intended…

If you weren’t already, be very careful about which extensions you are installing.

  • Excel
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    161 year ago

    So what? Malicious extensions can do anything. Don’t run untrusted code on any computer you care about, ever. This is true for any IDE extension, any NPM package, any mod pack, etc.

  • @[email protected]
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    121 year ago

    Glad this was found due to the open source nature of vscode, who knows how long something like this could have festered if someone malicious found it via decompiling and reverse engineering.

    Open source is great at finding vonurabilities fast and fixing them, but I can understand the idea behind closed source code taking longer to find but longer to become public, and be fixed

    • Avid Amoeba
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      41 year ago

      TBH, you don’t need to read any source to figure this out. If a third party binary can execute other processes under your user, they can do anything that you can which doesn’t require admin privileges. Given how many extensions launch other programs, it’s pretty much a given this is the case.