Knostic’s Post

A JavaScript injection attack on Cursor, facilitated by a malicious extension, can take over the IDE and the developer workstation. While we’re releasing a PoC, and it may even be unique, we’ve seen this kind of attack many times this past year alone. Our purpose is to deep dive into these attacks, understand why they continue to work, and suggest defensive approaches. Especially when it comes to cyber defense and AppSec (aside from Knostic wink wink), the industry doesn’t yet have capabilities in this realm. We demonstrate how an attacker can:  •⁠ ⁠Gain full file-system access •⁠ ⁠Modify or replace installed extensions  •⁠ ⁠Persist code that reattaches after restart. Impact: •⁠ ⁠Interpreter-level execution can directly call the file system and native APIs  •⁠ ⁠An attacker can inject JavaScript into the running IDE, fully controlling the UI. From a security program management perspective, AI coding assistants also increase the range of supply chain threats organizations must tackle. MCP servers, extensions, and even simple prompts and rules introduce third-party risks that push the CI/CD boundaries and extend the organizational perimeter to the developer’s workstation. Our blog: https://lnkd.in/dk_5Va39  – –  Knostic protects developers and AI coding agents against attacks such as these. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/du8w9RYJ

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