Claude Code official Cursor extension gets malware back door
In a supply chain attack, you don’t hack computer users — you hack the software they use. Vibe coders are great targets. So many of them have forgotten how to code. And they have the security instincts of vibe coders! We saw this play out with the NX hack last August. But NX is not that widely…
Annons
Annons
In a supply chain attack, you don’t hack computer users — you hack the software they use. Vibe coders are great targets. So many of them have forgotten how to code. And they have the security instincts of vibe coders! We saw this play out with the NX hack last August. But NX is not that widely used. You know what is widely used by vibe coders? Claude Code itself. Especially inside Cursor. On Thursday, Cursor reported the official Claude extension for Cursor contained a back door letting an attacker into your machine over ssh. The back door is persistent across reboots. [Cursor] Cursor says 5,000 users were affected. The infected versions are 2.1.312 or 2.1.313 — if you’ve got one of those, upgrade now! There’s a bunch of cleanup you’ll have to do as well. This only affects the Cursor Marketplace version. Other versions are not affected. It’s not clear from Cursor’s announcement how the malware got in there — there’s a lot of passive voice in the wording. It looks like someone got into Cursor and just put the infected version up on the Anthropic marketplace account. It doesn’t help that the Cursor Marketplace does not sign extensions. You can just pretend you’re Anthropic! Anthropic deny any involvement: [Twitter, archive] A malicious actor used access to Cursor’s marketplace to publish a tampered extension targeting Cursor’s users, we were not involved with building, publishing, or hosting this. So has there been fallout from this hack? There’s one big piece of possible fallout. I must stress, a smoking gun has not been confirmed — but I think it’s plausible. Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange, got hacked on Thursday, and they lost cryptos with a face value of $6.4 billion. Binance say the attack vector was a devops engineer’s laptop that had control of the systems at Binance. [Molly White; Twitter, archive] We also know that Binance uses Cursor and other vibe coding tools. This is standard text in Binance job ads, including devops jobs, where you deploy and manage the systems the exchange runs on: [Binance, archive] Integrate mainstream AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code) Because why wouldn’t you vibe code how you handle billions in crypto. That’s 100% the sort of decision a crypto guy would think was a brilliant time saver. The first guy to suggest the Binance hack might have been through Cursor seems to have been UK security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who dropped a mention of Binance using vibe code in the middle of a long Mastodon thread on the Cursor hack. [Mastodon; Medium] Again, we do not have the vibe code vector confirmed. But this is crypto with vibe coders. Whatever happened at Binance, it was something at least this stupid. Video — Podcast