A hacker breached Amazon’s AI-powered development tool, the Q Developer Extension for Visual Studio Code, injecting a data-wiping prompt into its codebase. The compromised version, 1.84.0, was released publicly on July 17 via Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code marketplace, where Amazon Q has nearly one million installs.
Amazon Q is a free extension designed to assist developers with coding, debugging, documentation, and configuration tasks using generative AI.
The breach was first reported by 404 Media and traced back to July 13, when a user under the alias ‘lkmanka58’ submitted a malicious pull request to Amazon Q’s GitHub repository. The submission included instructions for wiping systems to a near-factory state and deleting local and cloud files, though the code was reportedly non-functional due to formatting issues.
The attacker appears to have gained access by exploiting workflow misconfigurations or weak permission controls in Amazon’s repository. The breach went undetected until July 23, when security researchers alerted Amazon to suspicious behavior in the extension.
In response, Amazon launched an internal investigation and released a clean version, 1.85.0, on July 24.
“AWS Security has inspected the code and determined the malicious code was distributed with the extension but was unsuccessful in executing due to a syntax error. This prevented the malicious code from making changes to any services or customer environments,” the company said.
The company has since removed the compromised 1.84.0 version from all platforms and replaced affected credentials to secure the project.
