Anthropic has denied allegations that a malicious version of the official Claude Code extension published to Cursor’s marketplace was linked to any kind of compromise of its own systems.
The company was forced to issue a statement after prominent figures in the cybersecurity industry alleged that the extension, which infected up to 5,000 developers, was uploaded to Cursor’s marketplace following a breach at Claudemaker Towers.
Felix Rieseberg, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, Xeeted today: "We're working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn’t a compromise of Anthropic's systems or employee laptops.
"A malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn't build or publish. The versions on our official channels are not affected, and this only impacts Cursor users."
First spotted by EDR vendor Phorion, an unknown party pushed an update to Cursor's official Claude Code extension for Visual Studio Code that contained a persistent SSH backdoor written for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
According to Cursor, the extension – version 2.1.313 – was available to download for around 11 hours between 0227 and 1335 PT (0927 and 2035 UTC) on Thursday.
The vendors' analyses of the implant revealed that it collected information about the host machine and user, including usernames, configured Git emails, and public IP addresses, as well as attempting to open a reverse SSH tunnel.
Crucially, Cursor echoed Phorion's assessment that the package contained a critical flaw.
The script responsible for opening the SSH tunnel required admin rights on macOS and Windows to do so, and in the vast majority of cases it did not have these, resulting in failure.
Regardless, the extension still forwards the collected host and user data to the attacker, as well as dropping the attacker's SSH key and installing the persistence mechanism, so developers must go threat hunting in case their instance allows for the SSH tunnel to be created successfully.
Simply installing the latest version of the extension is not enough to clear the persistence mechanism, either.
The full details of how to remediate the issue, and links to download scripts to wipe the infection, are laid out in Cursor's account of the situation.
Aside from Rieseberg's statement today, neither Cursor nor Anthropic have commented on how the malicious package made its way to the official marketplace.
Anthropic's position is that a malicious actor uploaded the tampered copy to Cursor, but the latter has not outlined how it reached the marketpplace.
"[We] removed the malicious version from the marketplace immediately upon detection and blocked further distribution," Cursor said in the advisory. "We followed with a full shutdown of the VSCode Marketplace out of an abundance of caution."
It also ran checks to confirm no other extensions were compromised in the same way, rotated its own keys before restoring the marketplace, and worked with a cloud hosting provider to block the connection to the attacker's server, it said. ®
[Image text:] ANTHROP\C AI