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Comment by darkwi11ow | Hacker News Reader

Cursor uses OpenVSX marketplace (https://open-vsx.org/), that all non-Microsoft forks of VSCode utilize (official marketplace is only allowed in official proprietary VSCode release). It's not really related to Cursor/SpaceX in any way.

I suspect it's still Anthropic who were hacked, because they control OpenVSX account with release privileges.

edit:

Binance confirms my suspicions, via https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-30-2026-claude-cod...

  The affected Open VSX extension is owned by Anthropic employee Igor Kofman, but it is unclear whether his account or another part of the publishing process was compromised.

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Just did a quick search, OpenVSX has no extension signing?, no verifications?, what year is this...

This could have been avoided by having extensions signed by company doing them with keys and review

Yeah OpenVSX security is a joke, they also have dumb search algorithm which allows for easy squatting of similar-looking extension names so they show up in search first when you look for official extensions. There were quite a few prominent hacks done that way. I think Microsoft likes OpenVSX situation because it allows them to claim their proprietary VSCode marketplace to be more secure.

Vscode(ium) extensions are also pretty weak security wise in general. There's little guardrails on what an extension can do.

On publishing, I do see that the MS marketplace has much better typosquatting and rogue publisher protection. It's unclear to me how much better their SAST/scanning is than OpenVSX. Both have something, but both have been fooled many times, and recently.

Then why even allow employees to use that?

Binance got a pretty expensive lesson if that was the cause for their recent hack

There is no alternative really. Cursor was the market leader in LLM-assisted IDE experience before SpaceX acquisition, though Elon nerfed the product a lot in recent months. And there is still no good alternative to it. Google tries to compete via Antigravity, but that also uses OpenVSX. I myself use Cursor and use Claude there installed via OpenVSX, and was not affected only thanks to my laziness (I saw upgrade button, but became distracted and did not click). I hope this situation will become a trigger to improve OpenVSX security.

Why not use claude code directly?

Why risk getting compromised like that?

Well for me, as developer on a modern stack, there is always some risk involved. If not from agentic tools, then the package registries are compromised left and right, so it all comes down to mitigating the risk. I use Claude, Codex and Cursor/SpaceX agents, and Cursor comes very convenient to have all three in a single interface. Also I still code manually especially when prototyping, so having an IDE helps with it as well. I knew about OpenVSX situation with the search, so when installing extensions I always did triple-checking to verify the extension being really submitted by upstream and not by squatter; but now given upgrades can also deliver a compromise I am thinking of developing an extension that will act in similar manner to pnpm minimum release age.

To anyone who might be reading this exchange, actually there is recently added builtin setting for delayed auto-update, `extensions.autoUpdateDelay`, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/316867 and https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/321039

Cursor has their own mirror of OpenVSX. Some reporting suggests the tampered files were on the Cursor mirror but not the main OpenVSX. (This is shown, among other things, by the Anysphere plugins available in the Cursor mirror but not in OpenVSX.)

Edit: It seems Cursor is claiming the tampered files were only in their mirror.

A lot of this is turning into “well other company said” but Anthropic claims OpenVSX is fine?[1] And that Cursor has their own market place. I’m confused.

> Dworken from Anthropic here, that is correct: This only impacted the extension as it was hosted on the Cursor marketplace. It did not impact the official VS Code extension marketplace or OpenVSX. Users of Claude Code on VS Code are not impacted by this issue.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304585

Sort of hoping it's Anthropic and their specific OpenVSX account credentials. As opposed to the worse case of an OpenVSX flaw that's broader. A ton of AI-enabled IDEs are VsCodium forks pointed at OpenVSX...Cursor, Anti Gravity, Kiro, Trae, Devin, etc.

Now I'm glad I've not opened VSCodium in a few weeks; I prefer using Claude as a separate application anyways, will have to remove the extensions. No evidence, but I do feel like the problem is going to be OpenVSX and not Anthropic.

OpenVSX does have an option to use OIDC instead of a long lived token for publishing. I get the feeling a lot of people use the forever-good-unless-revoked token though.

https://github.com/eclipse-openvsx/openvsx/wiki/Trusted-Publ...

Edit: Ah, guess it was not open-vsx, but a in-house Cursor marketplace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304129

You're ignoring the "or" which is doing a lot of work.

Anthropic's position is seemingly that it was "another part of the publishing process [that] was compromised"

The hacks and vluns are blending into a blur for me now -- why is Binance confirming Anthropic compromise while they have their own $6 Billion compromise to look at /s

Vibecoders are safu

Boris: "By winter 2025, 100 percent of my code was written by Claude Code. Not a single line by hand."

Igor Kofman: "I do not write any code by myself anymore."

Turns out if you are not writing the code, then North Koreans might do it for you

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