A Russian blockchain engineer lost over $500,000 worth of cryptocurrencies in a sophisticated cyberattack, highlighting the persisting and increasing threats posed by hostile open-source packages.
Even seasoned users can be duped into installing malicious software by attackers using public repositories and ranking algorithms, despite the developer community’s growing knowledge and caution.
The incident was discovered in June 2025, when the victim, an experienced developer who had recently reinstalled his operating system and only employed essential, well-known applications, noticed his crypto assets had been drained, despite rigorous attention to cybersecurity.
The researchers linked the breach to a Visual Studio Code-compatible extension called “Solidity Language” for the Cursor AI IDE, a productivity-boosting tool for smart contract developers. The extension, which was made public via the Open VSX registry, masqueraded as a legal code highlighting tool but was actually a vehicle for remote code execution. After installation, the rogue extension ran a JavaScript file called extension.js, which linked to a malicious web site to download and run PowerShell scripts.
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