Jul 17, 2025Unverified
Amazon Q for VS Code ships with injected 'wipe the system' prompt
AI loose in the worldInjectionDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
An attacker submitted a pull request to the open-source aws-toolkit-vscode repository, was granted admin credentials, and planted a prompt instructing the Amazon Q coding agent to 'clean a system to a near-factory state' — deleting local files and cloud resources. The injected prompt shipped in the official 1.84.0 release of an extension with over 960,000 installs. AWS revoked the credentials, removed the code, and released 1.85, telling all users to update.
What this means for youAt home and at work, AI coding assistants can be turned against their users if the code behind them is tampered with. Governments and companies need to vet the supply chain for AI tools. Check that your coding extensions are updated to the latest version (Amazon Q 1.85 or later) and limit what permissions they have.
Sources
- SC Mediahttps://www.scworld.com/news/amazon-q-extension-for-vs-code-reportedly-injected-with-wiper-prompt
Incident records from the AI Agent Incident Database by sipi.bot (https://sipi.bot/incidents/), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Source data license: CC BY 4.0. Attribution to sipi.bot is required.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2363. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify