Microsoft has reinstated the ‘Material Theme – Free’ and ‘Material Theme Icons – Free’ extensions on the Visual Studio Marketplace after finding that the obfuscated code they contained wasn’t actually malicious.
The two VSCode extensions, which count over 9 million installs, were pulled from the VSCode Marketplace in late February over security risks, and their publisher, Mattia Astorino (aka ‘equinusocio’) was banned from the platform.
“A member of the community did a deep security analysis of the extension and found multiple red flags that indicate malicious intent and reported this to us,” stated a Microsoft employee at the time.