Supply Chain · Active since Oct 2025, new plugins as recently as June 10, 2026

15 malicious plugins on the official JetBrains Marketplace, posing as DeepSeek and CodeGPT AI coding assistants, quietly exfiltrated developers' AI provider API keys. Two of them — CodeGPT AI Assistant and DeepSeek AI Assist — passed 25,000 downloads each. The moment a developer pasted an OpenAI, DeepSeek, or SiliconFlow key into the plugin settings, it was shipped in plaintext HTTP to an attacker server. The keys were then resold — on the victims' bill.

What happened

The plugins were fully functional: chat, commit messages, code review, bug finding, unit tests. That's the point — they worked, so nobody looked twice. Underneath, a covert exfiltration path read the API-key field from the settings panel and POSTed it to a hardcoded endpoint over cleartext HTTP. No CVE, no software flaw — just trust abuse and supply chain.

In the same week, two "PromptSnatcher" Chrome ad-blocker extensions (100,000+ combined installs since 2022) were caught recording conversations from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Grok — genuine ad-blocking as cover, conversation scraping underneath.

This is the exact threat class RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense was built to detect, vet, and block — more on how below.

This isn't isolated — the AI coding surface is under sustained attack

The JetBrains campaign is the latest of many. The VS Code / Cursor / JetBrains extension ecosystem went from near-zero malicious activity to a steady stream of credential-stealing, source-exfiltrating, and self-propagating attacks in roughly 18 months:

Different payloads, one pattern: the IDE extension is now a first-class supply-chain target — and the thing it reaches for is your developers' credentials, source, and AI-provider keys.

Why this surface is so exposed

AI coding assistants exploded across enterprises in the last 18 months; governance didn't follow. A plugin runs with the developer's full privileges and holds a long-lived key to your most expensive accounts. And most security teams have zero inventory of which AI plugins and extensions their developers installed — you can't govern what you can't see.

The root cause is not "a bad plugin." It's a long-lived, all-powerful secret pasted into an untrusted tool.

The honest part: what governance can't do

Let's be straight, because the easy marketing answer ("we'd have stopped it") isn't true for anyone. No platform stops a developer from installing a plugin from an official marketplace — that's endpoint and MDM territory. RuntimeAI is not an EDR or a marketplace gatekeeper.

But the breach didn't happen because of the install. It happened because of what the plugin could steal. Change that, and the attack collapses.

What changes the outcome: RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense

RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense is built for exactly this attack class — it takes AI Discovery from inventory-only ("we see the plugin") to detect-vet-and-block ("this plugin is malicious, here's why, and we stopped it"). Five layers:

Most Advanced AI Security Discover · Vet · Block · Contain · Prove

Where RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense draws the line

We tell every customer exactly where the boundary is: RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense doesn't block the OS-level install — we detect, vet, block the exfil, and push the verdict to your MDM/EDR (Intune, Jamf, CrowdStrike) to quarantine. We ingest standard threat-intel feeds; we don't run a threat-research shop. The truthful ceiling is caught and neutralized before damage, not the plugin can never land on the machine.

The takeaway for every platform and security leader: stop asking "is this plugin safe?" and start asking "what could it steal if it isn't?" The right answer is "a short-lived token, fully audited" — not "the keys to our entire AI spend."

That's the bet behind RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense: identity for every agent, zero-trust enforcement at the point of action, and defence-in-depth with post-quantum-safe data security underneath. We'll say it plainly: we built one of the best identity stacks out there — and we still tell every customer it's the front door, not the whole house. RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense is what locks the rest of it.

See the malicious plugin before it sees your keys.

RuntimeAI Coding Agent Defense detects, vets, and blocks malicious AI coding plugins and browser extensions — across VS Code, Cursor, and JetBrains. Get the AI Security Weekly briefing for the threats that matter.

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