When AI Assistants Turn Against You: The Amazon Q Security Wake-Up Call

The Amazon Q Developer Extension for Visual Studio Code (version 1.84.0) was compromised via a software supply chain attack, embedding a prompt injection that bypassed security reviews. This malicious prompt, detailed in AWS Security Bulletin AWS-2025-015, instructed the AI assistant to systematically delete local file systems and AWS cloud resources, including S3 buckets, EC2 instances, and IAM users.

What Happened

The Amazon Q Developer Extension for Visual Studio Code (version 1.84.0) was compromised via a software supply chain attack, embedding a prompt injection that bypassed security reviews. This malicious prompt, detailed in AWS Security Bulletin AWS-2025-015, instructed the AI assistant to systematically delete local file systems and AWS cloud resources, including S3 buckets, EC2 instances, and IAM users.

Why This Matters

Publisher reporting describes a security event affecting version. BugSkan could not yet bind a CVE or affected version, so treat the source details as the current record.

Recommended Action

Confirm whether AWS is present in your environment and review vendor guidance for this report. Apply available patches or mitigations if your deployment matches the described conditions.

Exposure

Exposure reason: This incident does not currently match a technology in My Interests.

Exploitation status: UNKNOWN

Primary entities:

Timeline

• Incident first seen
  Jul 29, 2025 05:30

  BugSkan first recorded this incident.

• When AI Assistants Turn Against You: The Amazon Q Security Wake-Up Call - DevOps.com
  Jul 29, 2025 05:30

  devops.com · Vulnerability

Sources

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My Interests Match