The Oct 29 Cursor marketplace incident ran from a normal-looking extension update under the real publisher name. A few cheap controls catch this class:

• Alert on any IDE/Electron/Node child process that writes ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, creates a LaunchAgent, a scheduled task or a crontab entry.
• On developer machines that do not need inbound SSH, keep Remote Login / sshd off and have your MDM enforce it; the backdoor's tunnel was useless where SSH could not be enabled.
• For teams, pin approved extension versions and delay auto-updates for high-privilege extensions (coding agents, remote dev) by a day so a bad release can be pulled first.
• Keep long-lived cloud keys out of shell environment variables on dev boxes; the implant listed secret-looking variable names to pick targets.