Edit 2025-04-09 16:42Z - article was updated with a tenth package (Prettier - Code)
A set of ten VSCode extensions on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Marketplace pose as legitimate development tools while infecting users with the XMRig cryptominer for Monero.
ExtensionTotal researcher Yuval Ronen has uncovered ten VSCode extensions published on Microsoft’s portal on April 4, 2025.
The package names are:
- Prettier - Code for VSCode (by prettier) - 486K installs
- Discord Rich Presence for VS Code (by
Mark H) - 189K installs- Rojo – Roblox Studio Sync (by
evaera) - 117K installs- Solidity Compiler (by
VSCode Developer) - 1.3K installs- Claude AI (by
Mark H)- Golang Compiler (by
Mark H)- ChatGPT Agent for VSCode (by
Mark H)- HTML Obfuscator (by
Mark H)- Python Obfuscator for VSCode (by
Mark H)- Rust Compiler for VSCode (by
Mark H)
well the language server plugins all run a binary language server out of sandbox so zed doesn’t really do anything safer in particular there either. no ide has solutions, solutions don’t really exist right now. it’s not a problem of features of the language as much as it is features developers expect in extensions. I suppose there is a hypothetical “the extension wants to make this change to this file, approve” type flow like AI tools have now, but that sounds unpleasant to use. it still doesn’t get around things like language servers being designed to run as standalone processes out of sandbox.
by audits I meant you individually go and read all the code of all the extensions you use. of course that’s impossible too, but that was my point