A rare incident has just occurred with Visual Studio Code (VSCode). Several extensions of this toolkit have been unexpectedly removed by Microsoft from the Visual Studio Marketplace after they were flagged as potentially harmful, but in fact they were not.
The reason for Microsoft's confusion is mainly due to the presence of obfuscation in the source code of two themes, "Material Theme – Free" and "Material Theme Icons – Free". Obfuscation is a fairly common technique used by threat actors, so it's understandable that Microsoft is on high alert.
However, the fact that the code was obscured did not come from any malicious intent, and after realizing this, Scott Hanselman, Vice President of Developer Community at Microsoft, deeply apologized for the mistake. The two extensions have been restored to the Marketplace. A Microsoft representative said:
The developer account for Material Theme and Material Theme Icons (Equinusocio) was mistakenly flagged and has now been restored. In the interest of safety, we acted quickly and made a mistake. We removed these themes because they triggered multiple malware detection indicators within Microsoft, and our investigation led to the wrong conclusion. Microsoft cares deeply about the safety of the VS Code ecosystem and acted quickly to protect our users.
We understand the frustration and strong reaction of the author of the "Equinusocio" extension. This is bad, but sometimes unexpected incidents happen. We will clarify our policy on obfuscated code, update our scanner and investigation process to reduce the possibility of similar incidents happening again.
In short, these extensions are safe and have been restored for continued use by the VS Code community.
You can find detailed information about this issue on the official Visual Studio Marketplace GitHub repository .
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