Malicious Claude Extension on Cursor, GitLab KEV & Trezor Warning

A maliciously modified version (2.1.313) of Anthropic's Claude Code extension was distributed through Cursor's VS Code extension marketplace for roughly 11 hours on Oct. 29 (between 2:27 a.m. and 1:35 p.m. PT), exposing up to 5,000 developers to a JavaScript loader designed to install persistent SSH backdoors (BleepingComputer). Across a series of Friday security disclosures, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed active exploitation of maximum-severity GitLab vulnerability CVE-2026-97229 (BleepingComputer), hardware wallet maker Trezor warned of a suspected cellular crypto-theft implant in a Trezor Safe 5 sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis (BleepingComputer), and U.S. and UK authorities detailed a North Korean remote-worker guilty plea, GCHQ's audit of thousands of unaccounted storage devices, and a 42-month prison sentence for a Syrian Electronic Army hacker (CyberScoop, The Record, CyberScoop).

Cursor Removes Trojanized Claude Code v2.1.313 Extension After 11-Hour Window

Researchers at Phorion and OpenSourceMalware found that attackers prepended a malicious loader to extension.js in Claude Code version 2.1.313 on Cursor's marketplace — while leaving npm, Open VSX, and Microsoft's official Visual Studio Code Marketplace unaffected (BleepingComputer). Upon loading, the script collected the victim's username, hostname, public IP, Git email, and credential-related environment variable names, installed an svc-telemetry SSH key with 1-minute LaunchAgent or Windows scheduled-task persistence, and transmitted host details to 134.209.82.225. Coding bugs in the malware's setup routines — running systemsetup -getremotelogin without administrator rights on macOS and invoking /bin/sh from PowerShell on Windows — prevented it from enabling SSH on machines where SSH was not already running, and Cursor temporarily shut down its marketplace, rotated all access keys, and worked with the hosting provider to take the attacker's server offline.

CISA Adds GitLab CVE-2026-97229 to KEV Catalog and Trezor Flags CryptoBilis Safe 5 Implant

In enterprise DevSecOps — where GitLab serves over 50% of Fortune 100 companies and 70 million+ registered users — CISA added critical integer-overflow flaw CVE-2026-97229 in GitLab's CI/CD Regular Expression Compiler (discovered by researcher joaxcar and patched in Community and Enterprise Edition versions 19.4.2, 19.3.5, and 19.2.8) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, ordering federal agencies under Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 26-04 to patch by Sunday as Shadowserver tracks nearly 2,800 Internet-exposed CE instances (BleepingComputer). The alert follows 6 GitLab flaws tagged by CISA since November 2021 (including CVE-2021-22175 and CVE-2021-39935 in February) and 2026 patches for CVE-2026-0723, CVE-2026-110264, and CVE-2026-85706 (flagged by watchTowr).

In hardware security, Trezor warned users who bought Trezor Safe 5 devices from reseller CryptoBilis from March 2026 onward to transfer their digital assets to new wallets with fresh recovery phrases after an Indonesian customer who bought a Safe 5 on Tokopedia in August 2026 discovered an extra circuit board with a cellular module and antenna mounted between the main board and screen (BleepingComputer). Trezor had already halted sales through CryptoBilis on Oct. 9, 2026, after a similar implant was found in Ledger devices sold by the same retailer (linked to $3,500,000 in losses reported by Singapore police).

Defense Contractor Guilty in DPRK Scheme, GCHQ Device Audit, and 42-Month Sentence for SEA Hacker

In national security enforcement, 62-year-old Gainesville, Virginia defense contractor John Allen Kurrle Jr. (who held a top-secret clearance) pleaded guilty to wire-fraud conspiracy ahead of a Jan. 28, 2027 sentencing (facing up to 20 years in prison) after allowing North Korean remote-worker operatives to use his identity across 88 job applications between June and October 2025, yielding 9 job offers paying $120,000 to $190,000 annually — including a 3-week role paying $4,800 and 32 hours of onboarding paying $2,200 at a Ventura, California company working on a U.S. military generative AI project before a video check caught the mismatch, as tracked by DTEX investigator Michael Barnhart (CyberScoop). In the UK, Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office (IPCO) head Sir Brian Leveson reported in his 2025 annual report that British intelligence agency GCHQ cannot account for thousands of portable storage devices and logged 5 counter-terrorism port stops caused by flawed software selector discovery (The Record). And in Virginia federal court, 42-year-old Syrian Electronic Army hacker Ahmad Umar Agha ("Th3Pr0") — indicted in 2018 with fugitive Firas Dardar (carrying a $100,000 FBI reward in 2016) and Peter Romar (2015–2016) — was sentenced Thursday to 42 months in prison for hacking 47 Western targets between Aug. 24, 2011 and Jan. 31, 2024, including the April 23, 2013 Associated Press Twitter hijack that briefly erased $136 billion from the stock market, redirecting 3,500 visitors from the U.S. Marine Corps recruitment website, and causing $35,000-per-day losses for 6 months at 1 publisher vendor and $480,000 in losses ($250,000 in monitoring tools and retraining 800+ staff) at a global NGO (CyberScoop).