The connection appears to be simply that this is content marketing for Mend, which sells dependency vulnerability scanning software, so NPM is an important keyword for them to stuff in regardless of its relevance.

It doesn't directly. These are malicious VS Code extensions. It's completely Microsoft's fault for poorly managing the ecosystem. They must curate extensions with security audits prior to publication and sandbox them with advertised entitlements. Without these, it's running untrusted code from the internet putting users at risk for ransomware, password and cc skimmers, data harvesting, and other malware.

Whilst it could just be the company's need to market their NPM scanner... The article does appear to be at least edited through AI. Which could easily bleugh out the wrong target marketplace.

Maybe the vscode extension is just an npm package? I also couldn’t find the link to npm in the article.

The problem with the traditional antivirus signature model is that it's reactive rather than proactive. Once it's been identified by human or automated submission for human and/or automated analysis, the damage has likely already been done if it ran on a clean machine(s) already. But that's only the fraction of malware that will ever be identified because a large but unknowable fraction goes by unidentified, perhaps for all time. (When I was a Windows SA 20 years ago, I saw all sort of customer machines infected by advanced persistent threats that used evasion without any sort of antivirus signatures because they were novel threats.) What may be scanned by N vendors and deemed "safe" today and/or 10 years from now could be in fact malware by behavior.

PSA: Never run untrusted code on important machines. This might mean forbidding the use of third-party extensions for common applications until they are audited, something Microsoft clearly isn't doing.

Simplewall, windows firewall control, netlimiter.

I use orbstack for lightweight containers (macos docker), and https://github.com/jrz/container-shell for each project or experiment. Lightweight chrooted environments using containers. Firewalls only protect the network stack.

I'm not running it currently but one I'm aware of is GlassWire

https://www.glasswire.com/premium-features/

I have used Netlimiter on Windows in the past. It seems to have comparable functionality to Little Snitch

Portmaster.

> is the windows platform hostile to those sort of tools

No need for hyperbolics, just say you don't know.

The built in Windows Firewall does this. No need to pay for a 3rd party magic app.

Laud praise on Little Snitch all you want but Windows could quietly do this out of the box for two decades.

25 years ago we used ZoneAlarm and a variety of other tools.

I get your point and agree with that, but i think that the technique used here was interesting

Is it true that if you install a Cyrillic keyboard in Windows it stops some of those malware from installing? The theory is that they don't want to hack a site in their own country and end up getting a visit from Spetsnaz or get suicided.

Nice, I also did in our website https://www.mend.io/blog/fake-vs-code-extension-on-npm-sprea...

Also interesting how good Kaspersky is

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I think containers is the way to go. Maybe on top of VM (defense in depth-swiss-cheese is the only way to go imo). Something like Qubes can be great for VMs.

https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv/pull/153

This works for me (which I do run in VMs also, yes). A key thing is some secrets like GH token and signing keys are not available even for the IDE and code in the environment requiring them. Like a poor-mans HSM, made for dev, kinda. Also LLM assistant gets access to exactly what it needs. No more, No Less.

You can have your cake and eat it too.

https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv

Considering vscode is itself malware. Probably nothing other than, yes, use a separate VM.

I am an avid vscode advocate, but it is incredibly invasive and security ignorant.

Run a container/vm for your project. Use VSCode only as an interface. Dev containers should do this, but I don't like the performance. I use my own docker-powered chroot container thingy https://github.com/jrz/container-shell

Some extensions are client side so even VM won't work for all.

Node.js now has a stable permissions model, though it's very limited compared to Deno's (I don't see anything about blocking network requests). Node also says "This feature does not protect against malicious code"

https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v22.x/api/permissions.html

> When people delegate their brains to others, their own judgment naturally deteriorates and it makes them much easier to fool

A thought as old as thoughts about thoughts are, almost:

> For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

The quote above is about books, from Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14 (370-360 BCE). You by any chance feel the same about books as you feel about reusable JavaScript modules published on npm?

For variety, here's an example from the Go ecosystem: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/02/backdoored-package-...

> When people delegate their brains to others

I dunno, Linux distros have a pretty good track record at the same problem, over multiple decades of evidence.

The difference is that they don't allow self-publication. Canonical and Red Hat et. al. work downstream of an active community of developers cross-attesting good software. So their problem becomes "This software is known to be good, let's package it!". So to get malware into the machines of users it's not enough to fool the users, you need to fool the packagers too. And it happens, but very rarely (c.f. the xzutils mess from last year).

Node and similar repositories thought they could short-circuit that process, and as has been extensively documented, it doesn't work because users are too lazy to authenticate their own software.

how um is this different from pypi or public repos in other languages... you could try to publish junk anywhere

> why am I not surprised

Because VSCode and npm are popular.

It’s not like Ruby gems are immune to this. They just aren’t as popular.

I found it even more unsurprising that the fake extension targeted some crypto thing.

> it has the same description as the original truffle extension: “Build, debug and deploy smart contracts on EVM-compatible blockchains.”

This is an ironic statement, right? Because you’re mindlessly parroting a copy of a copy of what was once, probably, an intelligent and appropriately nuanced take? And because you’re attributing this to the “JS ecosystem” when supply chain attacks are common in many different ecosystems?

LLM-ass comment.

JS/TS having code reusability isn't a problem. Other ecosystems don't have the same problems not because they have package repos just as good as npm but write everything from scratch out of virtue, but because they don't have package repos just as good as npm.

Is this even related to npm? The extension was on the VS Code marketplace, I can't see any evidence that npm is involved at all besides that it's referenced in passing exactly once in the article:

> the need for caution when installing VS Code extensions, especially those obtained from public package registries like npm.

I'm not aware of any way to install a VS Code extension through NPM. The article honestly just reads like the author knew that Mend does a lot of business selling NPM dependency scanning and that they're therefore expected to stuff it as a keyword for SEO.

I definitely feel like NPM could be doing more to detect these. Right now it really feels like they're just hands off.

If you haven't tried it yet, both Firefox and Chrome offer different profiles[1][2], which comes with separate cookie stores and different installed extensions. The Firefox ones have a "this one goes to 11" level stupid UX (it's about:profiles, then click on Launch in New Profile) but to make up for it they offer Containers[3] which regrettably shares the same extensions as the host browser but awesomely hard sequesters the cookie and localStorage from other containers, and from the non-container default. Many people use it for all things QA since it's painless to log in to a website (AWS, Azure, etc) using totally different credentials

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

2: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

3: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

For what it's worth:

The DailyDev plugin only has access to "https://*.daily.dev/" and "https://*.dailynow.co/". It is also not required, you can just go to app.daily.dev yourself (I did not want to install the addon on my main PC)

Everybody hates on linux distributions. But this sort of stuff happens weekly on pypi and npm and almost happened once in debian.