ConfirmedVerifiedRating 5/5
At least one checkable detail was matched against the full text of the cited source.
Fact check
Version 2.1.313 of Anthropic's Claude VS Code extension, distributed through Anthropic's official account on Cursor's marketplace, was malicious.
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- 4/4
Other claims in this story
- ConfirmedCursor said the malicious version affected at most 5,000 users.
- ConfirmedUsers who installed or updated the extension from Cursor between 5:27 am and 4:35 pm ET on Thursday are considered affected.
- ConfirmedPer Cursor, the malicious code attempted to add an attacker-controlled SSH key, enable the local SSH service, and open a reverse SSH tunnel.
- ConfirmedPer Cursor, bugs in the malicious code made the SSH-key step fail unless Cursor was started with administrator privileges.
- ConfirmedAnthropic released version 2.1.314 several hours after the malicious version appeared, per researcher Kevin Beaumont.
- ConfirmedAs of Ars Technica's report, Anthropic had not publicly warned customers about the incident.
- UnconfirmedThe attacker's collection of environment-variable names was used to prioritize machines holding cloud credentials for follow-up attacks.
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