Turning Modern Day IDEs Into Attack Vectors Via Malicious Extensions

Overview: Visual Studio Code has become the de-facto IDE for millions of developers, and its extension marketplace is now a first-class target for supply-chain compromise. In this talk we move beyond yesterday’s JavaScript-only “theme” backdoors and show how to fuse high-level TypeScript with low-level Rust to create extensions that are indistinguishable from legitimate Microsoft-signed add-ons—yet silently execute native x86_64 shellcode inside the IDE process. We begin with a data-driven tour of recent in-the-wild incidents: the Material Theme extension with vulnerable dependencies , the “Solidity” ex Details: tension that stole $500 k in crypto from a Russian blockchain developer, and the new self propagating GlassWorm extension . The rise of AI-centric forks (Cursor, Windsurf, etc.) has also given a rise to new extension marketplaces where malicious extension can use inflated download counts to serve as perfect camouflage. Next we deep-dive into the malicious extension toolchain: a Rust FFI bridge that compiles to a library, exposes a single innocent-looking TypeScript API, and preserves the marketplace’s blue “verified” tick. We demonstrate live how to backdoor a top-10 Microsoft-published extension so that every subsequent update remains functionally identical while the Rust payload executes shellcode —without triggering Windows Defender, AMSI, or the new Extension Host sandbox. We close wit