Anthropic VS code extension on Cursor backdoored for almost 12 hours
An official extension for Anthropic’s Claude mannequin was backdoored and threatened as many as 5,000 builders’ machines, a number of sources reported Friday. Anthropic thus far has but to warn clients of the incident.
The compromised bundle was a VS Code extension out there within the market of Cursor, a maker of AI-assisted developer instruments, the corporate stated Friday. The malicious model, 2.1.313, subsequently affected “at most 5,000 customers,” presumably once they both downloaded it or their methods mechanically fetched and put in it. Anthropic pushed model 2.1.314 a number of hours after the earlier model grew to become out there on Cursor, in line with impartial researcher Kevin Beaumont. Each Beaumont and the CTO and co-founder of safety agency Phorion stated that model 2.1.313 was distributed by way of Anthropic’s official account on Cursor. To this point, neither Cursor nor Anthropic has defined how the attackers gained management of the account.
Seeking cloud credentials
“It was a supply-chain compromise the place the attacker gained entry to the official distribution channel,” Phorion CTO and co-founder Luke Roberts advised Ars. “The malicious model 2.1.313 was posted to the official Anthropic account, successfully superseding 2.1.312. Extensions auto-update in Cursor by default, however customers can configure this in settings.” Phorion has extra particulars right here.
Anthropic has but to difficulty public discover of the incident to clients.
Cursor stated that the malicious extension makes an attempt to put in a persistent SSH backdoor utilizing an added attacker-controlled SSH key, enabling the native SSH service and opening a reverse SSH tunnel. The code was written to work on Home windows, macOS, and Linux. As a result of Cursor extensions run with the permissions of the device’s Built-in Growth Setting, the backdoored model doubtless would acquire entry to native information, supply code, and developer tooling as soon as it was put in.
