2025 Amazon Q Developer for VS Code — destructive agent prompt shipped in v1.84 (CVE-2025-8217)

Vendor-confirmed AI supply-chain incident — AWS security bulletin AWS-2025-015, published July 23, 2025 and updated July 25, assigned CVE-2025-8217 to a compromise of the Amazon Q Developer extension for Visual Studio Code. While investigating a related bulletin, AWS found the extension’s CodeBuild configuration held an inappropriately scoped GitHub token; with it, a threat actor committed malicious code into the extension’s open-source repository that was automatically rolled into version 1.84.0 and shipped to developers. Reporting by The Register and SC Media described the payload as a wiper-style natural-language instruction telling the AI agent to clear the developer’s filesystem and delete AWS resources — an attack expressed as a prompt rather than as code. AWS revoked and replaced the credentials, removed the code, released version 1.85.0, and said inspection showed the malicious code was distributed but never executed successfully because of a syntax error, so no services or customer environments were changed. Catalogued as an AI-attack-surface incident: no data loss, but a working demonstration that a stolen CI token plus a coding agent equals destructive capability on every machine that installs the update.