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.
I wouldn’t be too hard on Microsoft. The requirement to curate public package repositories only emerged somewhat recently, as demonstrated by the likes of npm, and putting in place a process to audit and pull out offending packages might not be straight-forward.
I think the main take on this is to learn the lesson that it is not safe to install random software you come across online. Is this lesson new, though?
I think people often have a vaguely formed assumption that plugins are somehow sandboxed and less dangerous. But that all depends on the software hosting the plugin. There was a recent issue with a KDE theme wiping a user’s files which brought this to light. We can’t assume plugins or themes are any less dangerous than random executables.
Hold them all to account, no single points of failure. Make them all responsible.
When talking about vscode especially, those users aren’t your mum and dad. They’re technology professionals or enthusiasts.
With respect to vendors (Microsoft) for too long have they lived off an expectation that its always a end user or publisher responsibility, not theirs when they’re offering a brokering (store or whatever) service. They’ve tried using words like ‘custodian’ when they took the service to further detract from responsibility and fault.
Vendors of routers and firewalls and other network connected IoT for the consumer space now are being legislatively enforced to start adhering to bare minimum responsible practices such as ‘push to change’ configuration updates and automated security firmware updates, of and the long awaited mandatory random password with reset on first configuration (no more admin/Admin).
Is clear this burden will cost those providers. Good. Just like we should take a stance against polluters freely polluting, so too should we make providers take responsibility for reasonable security defaults instead of making the world less secure.
That then makes it even more the users responsibility to be responsible for what they then do insecurely since security should be the default by design. Going outside of those bounds are at your own risk.
Right now it’s a wild West, and telling what is and isn’t secure would be a roll of the dice since it’s just users telling users that they think it’s fine. Are you supposed to just trust a publisher? But what if they act in bad faith? That problem needs solving. Once an app/plugin/device has millions of people using it, it’s reputation is publicly seen as ok even if completely undeserved.
Hmm rant over. I got a bit worked up.