VS Code Forks Recommend Missing Extensions, Creating Supply Chain Risk in Open VSX

Popular AI-powered Visual Studio Code forks such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae have been found to recommend extensions that do not exist in the Open VSX registry, creating potential supply chain risks when malicious packages are published under those names. The issue arises because these IDEs inherit the official extension recommendations from Microsoft’s marketplace, but those extensions are not present in Open VSX.

“The problem: these recommended extensions didn't exist on Open VSX,” said Koi security researcher Oren Yomtov, noting that unclaimed namespaces could be registered and used to upload anything. An attacker could weaponise the absence of these extensions and the forks’ VS Code heritage to publish rogue additions such as ms-ossdata[.]vscode-postgresql. In response, Cursor and Google have rolled out fixes, and the Eclipse Foundation has removed non-official contributors and tightened registry safeguards.

The placeholder PostgreSQL extension attracted at least 500 installs, underscoring how straightforward trust in such recommendations can lead to unintended deployments and potential theft of credentials, secrets, and source code.