A group of Israeli researchers explored the security of the Visual Studio Code marketplace and managed to "infect" over 100 organizations by trojanizing a copy of the popular 'Dracula Official theme to include risky code. Further research into the VSCode Marketplace found thousands of extensions with millions of installs.
What makes this even more sneaky is that JetBrains has a theme called “Darcula”.
So, with a wider generic theme called Dracula and themes that duplicate JetBrains Darcula theme, it is no surprise that “Darcula Official” is being installed.
It’s more than just a typosquat
Edit:
But why can a theme make web requests?!
It’s not a theme here, it’s an extension.
I think that’s how themes are distributed for VSCode, right?
With VSCode, everything is an extension.
But the vscode marketplace seems to have filters for themes, so there must be some way to differentiate them.
I think extensions need a permissions system
You declare it in the package.json as a category when publishing. It’s completely self-selected with no oversight, review, or enforced permissions.
You can install themes directly from the theme selector.
Even worse, it also previews the theme when selected. I hope that the logic they use for that feature works in a simpler way.
I checked the logic and there is no rce.