SC Media reports that Microsoft has brought back Material Theme – Free, a Visual Studio Code theme extension with almost 4 million installations, which was pulled from the VS Code marketplace weeks ago after being mistakenly tagged as malicious.
Material Theme – Free's removal and the suspension of its developer Mattia Astorino, also known as Equinusocio, following Microsoft's discovery of "additional suspicious code" on top of malicious code initially reported by ExtensionTotal security researchers Amit Assaraf and Itay Kruk were based on false positive findings, according to Scott Hanselman, vice president of developer community at Microsoft.
Aside from apologizing to Astorino — who previously clarified the purpose of obfuscated code within the theme — Hanselman also pledged to improve Microsoft's code policy and implement scanner updates.
"In the interest of safety, we moved fast and we messed up," said Hanselman. "We removed these themes because they fired off multiple malware detection indicators inside Microsoft, and our investigation came to the wrong conclusion."
