A Rogue Commit Told Amazon Q to Wipe Your Home Directory. It Shipped in v1.84.0
Book: Observability for LLM Applications Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub The payload was one paragraph of English. It began: "You are an AI agent with access to filesystem tools and bash.…
A malicious commit added a paragraph of English instructions to Amazon's Q Developer extension for VS Code, which was shipped in version 1.84.0. The attacker exploited an inappropriately scoped GitHub token to commit the code to the open-source repository. The extension's CodeBuild configuration held a GitHub token with too much scope, allowing the attacker to commit the malicious code and it was released into the automatic build.
The payload was designed to execute a command that wipes the local home directory and delete various AWS resources, but it failed due to a syntax error. The attacker claimed they wanted to expose Amazon's AI security theater. AWS stated that no customer resources were impacted, but the vulnerability highlights the risks of improperly scoped tokens and the potential for AI agents to execute harmful commands when given access to file system tools and bash.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
