HOW WE PREVENTED CURSOR, WINDSURF, & GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY FROM RECOMMENDING MALWARE

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Researchers discovered that AI IDEs forked from VSCode, including Cursor, Windsurf, and Google Antigravity, inherited hardcoded extension recommendation lists pointing to Microsoft marketplace namespaces that were unclaimed on OpenVSX, the open-source alternative these IDEs actually use. An attacker could have registered these unclaimed namespaces and uploaded malicious extensions that the IDEs would proactively recommend to millions of developers based on file types or installed software. The researchers preemptively claimed the vulnerable namespaces and coordinated with the Eclipse Foundation and vendors to remediate, noting that over 1,000 developers installed their inert placeholder extensions simply because their IDE recommended them.