One Click, and Every Private Repo Is Theirs

One click. One single click. And all of your private code is in an attacker's hands.

Not through aggression. Not through a sophisticated phishing email pretending to be your bank. Just a click on a link, inside the tool you work with every day.

A security researcher named Ammar Askar disclosed a zero-day in github.dev - the version of VS Code that runs in the browser. The attack works like this:

Somebody sends you a link. You click it.
In the background, malicious code simulates keystrokes inside the interface.
Those keystrokes install a malicious extension.
The extension lifts your GitHub OAuth token.

And here is the real problem: that token is not limited to the repo you opened. It gives access to every private repository you have permission to reach. Every one.

Translate that into business language

Your code is the company's IP. It is the product. It is the trade secret. It is years of development. And an attacker can steal all of it in one click, because you trusted your tool without asking questions.

Incidentally, the attackers who exploited this had access to around 3,700 of GitHub's own internal repositories. Yes, you read that correctly. Not some small startup. GitHub.

The pattern that repeats

I have been doing penetration testing for more than 20 years, and I will tell you the pattern that comes back again and again: developers trust their tools blindly. They install extensions without checking who wrote them. They grant permissions without reading what they are approving. They click links because “it's VS Code, what could happen”.

And that is exactly what attackers count on. Not on a technical weakness. On a human one - on our blind trust in the tools we use every single day.

Microsoft fixed the problem. Good. But the more important question is: how many extensions are installed for you right now that you have never checked the authors of?

I first shared a version of this as a LinkedIn post on 2026-06-26. It is republished here, lightly edited, so it is easier to find and reference. — Erez Metula

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