Vibe coders targeted with Pokémon, Minecraft-themed add-ons: malware steals crypto

Looking at plain code feels too boring, so you add a little animated sidekick to keep you entertained or a new theme to keep you focused? Pwned. Security researchers are flagging a wave of VS Code extensions that quietly mine cryptocurrency or potentially worse.

Secure Annex researcher John Tuckner uncovered five new malicious extensions on the VS Code marketplace, all published by the same developer using the alias “DevelopmentInc.”

Already downloaded hundreds of times, they pose as tools tailored for developers with AI (vibe coders). VS Code is a very popular and free code editor from Microsoft and a go-to choice for programmers.

One extension suggests it will add Pokémon-themed syntax highlighting, animated sprites, dynamic status bar colors, random “wild Pokémon encounters” in the output panels, and even code snippets for Pokémon-themed comments. Neat.

“Sadly, the extension contains no theme functionality, dancing Pikachu sprites, and immediately executes malicious code upon installation,” Tuckner said in a blog post about malicious cryptominers on the VS Code marketplace.

“The extension only downloads malware instead of even changing highlighting syntax or showing Pikachu when you hover functions.”

The obfuscated extension code hides the “activate()” function, which runs automatically when the extension is enabled. It downloads malware from an attacker-controlled server, saves it to the temporary directory as sap.exe, and then executes it. The malicious extension attempts to blend in with the traffic by spoofing requests as if they originated from Chrome.

During testing, the retrieved malicious payload was identified as Monero cryptomining malware, capable of privilege escalation, disabling Windows Defender, and achieving persistence. It would select the closest mining pool, attempt to download a region-specific mining executable, and run it.

The researcher utilized AI tools to analyze the extension on the Secure Annex MCP server, which aids in decoding obfuscated code and analyzing behaviors.

Other extensions had similar functionality, despite claiming to be “the best AI coding agent for frontend,” offering a Minecraft theme for debugging, or similar features.

The malicious extensions appear to have been removed from the marketplace at the time of writing; however, similar threats can resurface quickly – be cautious before installing any add-ons.

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