PSA: Before you install any Claude Code plugins, understand what you’re actually agreeing to I’ve been building a plugin for my own use and went deep on how the system works. There’s a security implication I don’t see discussed anywhere. Note: this applies to third-party plugins, not plugins from Anthropic’s official marketplace which are manually reviewed. What actually happens when you install a third-party plugin: Hooks are bash scripts that execute in your project directory — no sandbox, no permission model The plugin auto-updates silently at every Claude Code startup , pulling the latest from the source GitHub repo No notification, no diff, no confirmation prompt So you’re not making a one-time decision. You’re giving that GitHub repository ongoing, silently-refreshing shell access to your machine indefinitely. It gets worse. A plugin can ship with no hooks at all — just useful commands, looks clean on audit. Then a future update quietly adds a SessionStart hook. Now it runs on every startup, and you never reviewed that hook because it didn’t exist when you installed it. That’s the perfect slow play: build an install base, add the malicious hook six months later. This is structurally the npm event-stream incident, except npm packages run sandboxed. These hooks don’t. Your .env files, SSH keys, AWS credentials — all reachable. The official guidance is: “make sure you trust a plugin before installing.” Trust it once, apparently, because after that it updates itself forever. The only safe approach: fork the repo, audit the code, use your fork as the source. You control when updates happen — pull upstream deliberately, review the diff, then merge. A compromised upstream can’t touch you. Fork anything you install. Treat every third-party plugin as what it is: a stranger’s bash script with access to your codebase that re-runs from source every morning. submitted by /u/FF-Life
Originally posted by u/FF-Life on r/ClaudeCode