Live data from Hacker News

Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

jamf.com

61–70 of 306 posts

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#61
post #8

It is scary that a text editor can run hidden code just by opening a folder. We traded our safety for convenience and now we are paying the price. Users will always click the button to trust a file if they think it helps them work faster. We cannot blame them when the software design makes it so easy to make a mistake.

Doesn't it ask you if you trust a folder when you open it?

Who remembers autorun.exe

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#62

Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays? Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects. Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two. Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

Never liked Eclipse, but I’ve been forced to use VSCode over my preferred JetBrains IDEs because it is the only modern mainstream editor with a competent client-server mode. As in, actually rendering the UI locally while doing all the code indexing and intelligence on the server. Corporate world would much rather maintain disposable remote VMs than help you unfuck your laptop after whatever required security upgrade installs the wrong version of a scripting language and sends everything to hell.

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#63

Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays? Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects. Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two. Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

Thing that IntelliJ and even NetBeans have going for them is that they seem like tools for getting work done. Eclipse puts more emphasis on being a platform which means you have to download and configure plugins just to get started. Great if you're a corporate shop with a standard setup that's force-pushed to every machine. Not so much if you're just getting started or working on side projects or in a startup, which is how languages and frameworks gain mindshare in the web era.

Visual Studio Code—I dunno. It's an editor more than an IDE. It lets Webdev Andys create an empty directory, put an index.ts in there, and get started right away. Yes, WebStorm does the same, but VS Code comes with decent multilanguage support for free. It's like vim or Emacs but crappier and more bloated, but a lot of people don't care about that.

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#64
post #50
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content. Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. For years and years I had people telling…

It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that. They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE. In eclipse's defence, we…

16gb. Ram in 2010?! That's like top 10%, not standard. Even now computers are shipping with 16/32gb ram

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#65
post #50
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content. Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. For years and years I had people telling…

It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that. They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE. In eclipse's defence, we…

>They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

With the current prices it is still wild mate.

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#66

Is tasks.json automatically run? I thought additional user interaction was required?

The article doesnt' claim it's executed straight up either ("can result") but it's pretty ambiguous:

> When the project is opened, Visual Studio Code prompts the user to trust the repository author. If that trust is granted, the application automatically processes the repository’s tasks.json configuration file, which can result in embedded arbitrary commands being executed on the system.

In the screenshot the task is named "node" - so it's a bit like embedding a malicious Makefile target as a backdoor.

Except harder to spot since it's in a obscure .vscode/somethingsomething json file. (And probably you can easily fool GH Copilot to run it)

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems very odd to me that someplace would force the use of a particular development tool. I've seen it only one time while interviewing, where they wanted everyone to have identical setups so they could easily hop onto each others computers when needed... it was weird and I took it as a red flag and didn't follow through them them.

That is a massive red flag to me too. They are basically saying "you are identical to everyone else, and easily replaced."

Having a consistent setup makes it easier for your organization's IT team to support you, troubleshoot issues, etc. It also makes it easier for you to collaborate with other members of your team, or even other teams. If your coworker Fred comes to you asking for help on how to refactor something, for instance, it will go much more easily if you're running the same IDE with the same refactoring tools.

Organizations establish and enforce standards for a reason.

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#68
post #32

Maybe I'm a dinosaur in this regard but I don't like nor trust any of these desktop application that are really just Web technologies with an embedded browser eg Discord. They're resource hogs and the attack surface is huge. You're basically betting that automatic code that's run won't find a vulnerability and escape the sandbox from an entire browser. I have way more trust in Jetbrains IDEs and the JVM as a sandbox…

Won’t IDEA automatically index/execute some Gradle code when possible? As soon as you execute an arbitrary binary/script from the project directory, the isolation of the JVM doesn’t matter.

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#69

I do feel like better application sandboxing is needed but so much open source software is built on the Unix abstraction meaning you have to run in a container, but macOS doesn’t have containers as far as I can see, and containers themselves are a bit of a poor abstraction, although maybe the best we can do with Unix at the core. I think something closer to Roblox studio would be cool where when you open an environme…

It's a good idea so it can't take over your dev machine.

But not sufficient since it'll still F over whatever code you are working on resulting in a backdoored app getting deployed + infected dev scripts etc bringing interesting times to your teammates, downstream open source project users, your api keys and cloud credentials getting compromised etc.

Re: Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

#70

Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays? Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects. Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two. Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

I've also used Eclipse in the past but almost exclusively used vscode in recent years. It's just a phenomenal text editor. It's got fantastic multi-line selection and editing tools and searching for files is instant and you don't even need to be fully accurate with the filename. Nowadays I hardly ever use the sidebar to look for the file, I just type thr ctrl+e shortcut and insert several letters of the file and I instantly get the result. It's a small thing with a huge impact. VS, for comparison, lags a few seconds when searching files, and it misses files that are not imported into the workspace. That difference makes VS useless to me.
Post reply on HN