Overview
- Security firm Aikido Security identified a coordinated campaign of at least 15 JetBrains Marketplace plugins that share hidden key‑theft behavior, with samples first published in October 2025 and new submissions continuing through June 10, 2026.
- Each plugin works as advertised but hooks the settings save routine so that when a user pastes a provider key and clicks Apply the key is sent to a hardcoded attacker server at 39.107.60.51 over unencrypted HTTP.
- The cluster was published under seven vendor accounts and has roughly 70,000 reported downloads in total, with DeepSeek AI Assist and CodeGPT AI Assistant each showing more than 25,000 downloads, though counts can be inflated.
- Researchers found a paid tier that returns a working API key to paying users, leading investigators to hypothesize operators may be harvesting keys from free users and reselling or sharing them with buyers.
- At the time of reporting the malicious packages remained available and JetBrains had not publicly responded, so Aikido published indicators of compromise and researchers advise developers not to paste long‑lived secrets into unvetted IDE extensions.