I believe they're referring to lower down in the article, where the researchers analyzed existing extensions on the marketplace:
After the successful experiment, the researchers decided to dive into the threat landscape of the VSCode Marketplace, using a custom tool they developed named 'ExtensionTotal' to find high-risk extensions, unpack them, and scrutinize suspicious code snippets.
Through this process, they have found the following:
1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
1,452 running unknown executables.
2,304 that are using another publisher's Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.
If you look at the code of one of the "malicious code", it hit a ... local IP, not a remote one.
Does that mean the hacker is in my room??
We're seeing connections from IP addresses that aren't even routable on the internet. We're compromised. Time to format.
I believe they're referring to lower down in the article, where the researchers analyzed existing extensions on the marketplace:
If you look at the code of one of the "malicious code", it hit a ... local IP, not a remote one.
Does that mean the hacker is in my room??
We're seeing connections from IP addresses that aren't even routable on the internet. We're compromised. Time to format.
Turns out you were the hacker all along