Mazin Ahmed

Founder / CTO

FullHunt

Mazin Ahmed is a security engineer specializing in application and offensive security. He has discovered vulnerabilities in major platforms such as Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Oracle.

Speaker sessions

VS Code, Cursor AI, and the Backdoor You Didn't See Coming

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is one of the most trusted and widely used tools in software development. With an extensive ecosystem of extensions enhancing its functionality, it has become indispensable across enterprises and individual developers alike. But what if the very extensions developers trust could be used against them?This talk will expose a critical and largely unexplored attack surface in the software supply chain: the VS Code and Cursor AI extension marketplaces. Through original research and live demonstrations, I will show how I developed and successfully published a malicious VS Code extension capable of exfiltrating sensitive environment variables, bypassing Microsoft's marketplace security checks, evading endpoint detection solutions, and escalating to a full backdoor implant using a stealthy post-exploitation agent.We will walk through the technical journey of crafting "Piithon-linter," the techniques used to bypass both static and dynamic marketplace analysis (including sandbox scanning evasion in Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem), and how open ecosystems like Open VSX (used by Cursor AI and others) offer even less security scrutiny. The session will highlight why developer machines are high-value targets, how traditional security tools fail to monitor this vector, and what security teams, developers, and marketplace operators must do to defend against such threats.