In less than four hours early Tuesday, an attacker compromised a GitHub maintainer account and unleashed a self-replicating piece of malware which injected malicious code into more than 440 distinct npm packages, according to multiple security firms. 

The worm, built on the open-source Mini Shai-Hulud repository that TeamPCP published in May, was initially let loose in keyv, a data management interface software package with more than 600 million monthly downloads. The attacker spent the next 30 minutes compromising additional packages controlled by the same maintainer, including cacheable, flat-cache, file-entry-cache.

The attack spread to other maintainers, eventually compromising more than 860 packages with a “combined total of over 2 billion monthly installs,” Ilyas Makari, malware researcher at Aikido Security, wrote in a blog post. 

Wiz researchers told CyberScoop it hasn’t observed any new malicious packages since the initial wave moved through a massive footpoint of cloud and code environments in those first four hours. 

“This is the most critical initial compromise, with over 155 million weekly downloads on the root packages,” Wiz Research said in an email. 

Some of the compromised packages, including keyv, flat-cache and file-entry-cache, are present in more than 46% of all cloud environments, according to Wiz. “By comparison, back in the Shai-Hulud 2.0 campaign the most prevalent packages were only in about 28% of environments,” the company said. 

“Time will tell whether the eventual cost and impact outpaces past attacks, or whether adoption of hardening mechanisms such as package aging, and the usage of the relatively less aggressive Mini Shai-Hulud code as basis, will defray the final toll here,” Wiz Research added. 

Researchers from multiple firms sprung into action to monitor the widening attack spree and published indicators of compromise to help potential victims hunt for malicious activity in their systems. 

The Mini Shai-Hulud variant used in these attacks scoops up a trove of sensitive data, including npm, GitHub, AWS and continuous integration credentials. It also steals AI-related configuration files and cryptocurrency wallets, researchers said. 

Microsoft, Aikido, Socket and Wiz all said the same payload and pattern was observed across all affected packages, indicating a single attacker or threat cluster was behind the supply-chain attack and using multiple stolen tokens. 

The malware showcased a few pieces of new functionality, but retained the same core mechanisms that are hallmarks of Mini Shai-Hulud. 

“The evolution is consistent with what we’ve seen from them in past waves, however we don’t yet have the hard links” to confidently attribute the attacks to TeamPCP, Wiz Research said.

The notorious threat actor, which Google previously told CyberScoop it attributes to one core operator that was located in South Africa during at least some of the attacks, compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages in less than four months earlier this year.

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While AI is supposed to help defenders, it’s now creating more than twice as much noise as human-triggered incidents CrowdStrike detects as potentially malicious. The company’s threat hunting team and systems triaged an average of 14 million detection leads daily, resulting in about 36,000 customer alerts during the one-year period ending in June.

“AI agent-driven behaviors have surged past human triggers,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. “AI has driven the detections significantly above what humans are causing, and this gives you a sense of how frequently AI is being used, and really just that it’s being used everywhere.”

The threat posed by AI showed up incessantly during the past year, sparking alarming shifts and heightened targeting across software defects, open-source supply chains and AI tools themselves — all of which create greater difficulties for defenders, CrowdStrike said in its annual threat hunting report. 

“The AI tools that are being implemented by every enterprise across the globe right now are also creating an extended attack surface,” Meyers said during a press briefing. 

“AI is now a tool, a target, and a force multiplier for adversaries,” researchers wrote in the report, adding that AI-enabled malicious activity surged 89% during the past year as attackers used the technology to scale operations, hasten tradecraft and target AI infrastructure.

Attackers are using frontier AI models to uncover vulnerabilities and develop resources, including AI-generated scripts, payloads and commands that increase their effectiveness and efficiency. The technology also allows threat groups to design more creative ways to run automated attacks and boost impact by manipulating, interrupting or sabotaging AI systems and data.

“AI is both the weapon and the target,” Meyers said. 

Most organizations don’t view it as such, and thus far haven’t secured or put proper guardrails around the AI tools they use or address the ways attackers can use AI against them, he added. 

AI’s mark on vulnerabilities is particularly concerning, as reflected by what Meyers described as “one of the scarier stats” in this year’s report: 88% of vulnerabilities were weaponized through AI within 48 hours. 

“This is creating a rich ecosystem of vulnerabilities for attackers to use against various systems,” he said. It also renders the 30-day patch window obsolete, forcing organizations to struggle under a new baseline patch cycle of 24 to 48 hours, according to Meyers.

The AI ecosystem also became the next software supply chain battleground during the past year, as evidenced by TeamPCP’s rampage through open-source software in the first half of this year. 

The threat cluster compromised more than 300 software dependencies in one day, Meyers said. 

AI tools are already in the crosshairs and the attack surface will continue to grow as agentic systems, AI application integrations and dependency managers for AI agents proliferate, the report concluded.

“The same AI tools driving modern businesses are creating under-defended attack surfaces that adversaries are exploiting,” Meyers said. “We have to secure AI. This is absolutely critical.”

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A cyberattack that poisoned the data pipeline of a major AI code platform was carried out using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company said Tuesday.

Last week, Hugging Face, a platform for sharing and working on AI code, disclosed that an external attacker had compromised its data processing pipeline. According to a July 21 blog post, the attacker poisoned a dataset to run code on a processing worker, eventually gaining node-level access and stealing cloud credentials.

The attack is notable, the blog said, because it appears to have been carried out by an autonomous AI system, which executed “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.”

At the time, Hugging Face said it wasn’t clear which LLM was used in the attack, but noted that their own attempts to recreate parts of the attack using an in-house commercial model failed due to guardrail restrictions.

The incident and its ultimate impact are still being investigated, and Hugging Face said it reported the incident  to law enforcement and is engaging with third-party cybersecurity forensic specialists to learn more.  

“This experience points to a gap worth planning for,” the company wrote. “We do not know which model powered the attacker’s agents, whether a jailbroken hosted model or an unrestricted open-weight one; either way, the attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried.”

Now OpenAI is confirming one of their models was used in the attack.   

“After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities,” the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

OpenAI called the incident “unprecedented” but also predicted that such attacks would  become increasingly more common as AI adoption continues to grow.

According to the company , the incident happened during an internal evaluation,  where the company deliberately prompts models to “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” in order for the company to study and measure the model’s cybersecurity capabilities.

To assess the model’s full potential, the team disabled the production classifiers that normally prevent OpenAI models from carrying out high-risk cyber activity. Without these safeguards,  the models were able to install software packages through registries like Hugging Face.

The model collected and chained vulnerabilities from OpenAI’s systems as well as Hugging Face’s production infrastructure.

OpenAI further explained that the activity stemmed from models attempting to solve a specific challenge posed by ExploitGym, a benchmarking system for AI agents.While such tests normally run in isolated environments, in this instance,  the model spent a “substantial” amount of compute resources figuring  out how to access the open internet. It did so by using a zero-day vulnerability in a third-party vendor’s system used by OpenAI (the company said it disclosed the flaw to the vendor).

“After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym,” OpenAI wrote. “Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.”

In one instance, the model chained together multiple stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities to find a remote code execution path on Hugging Face servers.

OpenAI said it was implementing new controls for infrastructure configuration, something that would come at “the cost of research velocity while the vulnerabilities are patched.” 

Hugging Face was also added to OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber program, which will give them access to more advanced models like Daybreak to scour their systems for other AI-discovered vulnerabilities.

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TeamPCP is on a rampage through open-source software.

In less than four months, the threat actor has compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages. The extraordinary spree has transformed how software developers and maintainers distribute and manage their code, as their dependencies and repositories have become one of the most effective and prevalent attack vectors this year.

While there has been a host of technical exploits, TeamPCP’s greatest attack has been the uprooting of trust — repeatedly proving that most organizations fail to verify the code they ingest into their systems is legitimate, abusing a nearly blind faith that much of the software development industry relies on to power today’s modern economy.

Starting with Trivy in February, TeamPCP’s attacks have shaken that trust many times over.

The scale of TeamPCP’s attacks lies partly in the automated systems companies use to deploy code, like CI/CD pipelines. It is also capitalizing on new security gaps created by developers’ increasing reliance on AI. Yet, with relatively low effort and unoriginal tactics, TeamPCP is wrecking open-source frameworks and underlying systems at levels the technology community has rarely reckoned with.

“Developers didn’t do a great job of analyzing the security of their open-source dependencies before but, now with AI, there’s in some cases virtually no human in the loop or any kind of sanity check on what these tools are doing,” Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO at Socket, told CyberScoop.

“You have agents installing packages that haven’t been vetted,” he said. “When an attacker gets in, the impact is even broader because there’s less checks and balances to stop it from affecting everybody.”

TeamPCP hasn’t identified a new problem or proved anything novel. The crux of these attacks hinge on a central theme — defensive vulnerabilities the entire software industry has known about for years. Researchers and developers know the open source trust model is broken and susceptible to sabotage. Yet, the software industry has not fixed this problem. 

“The speed and scale of these attacks is what makes it most notable, not necessarily the methodology behind it, because at the core it is really about exploiting third-party trusts that we have,” said Kimberly Goody, senior manager at Google Threat Intelligence Group.

Software packages are typically subjected to intensive security monitoring to test for vulnerabilities and poisoned updates before they are released to live environments. 

Yet, the real vulnerability highlighted by TeamPCP lies further up the chain of command with the organizations or individuals that publish these packages to the wider market, according to Nathaniel Quist, manager of cloud threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks.

“It is their responsibility to secure their credentials and not provide a jump off point to trigger a supply-chain event,” he said. “Everything that interacts with or crosses through that zone must be highly monitored and controlled to ensure a compromise can be contained quickly and easily.”

TeamPCP’s motivation

TeamPCP, like any prolific cybercriminal, has captured significant attention from threat hunters since it emerged in late 2025. Google attributes the activity to one core operator.

The company said it traced TeamPCP’s residential and mobile IP address connections to South Africa, indicating the primary operator was located there during at least some of its attacks.

“We don’t believe that there’s an established core group, at least not yet, and that a lot of this has been conducted by an individual,” Goody said. Google declined to name the core operator or confirm it knows the person’s true identity. 

Palo Alto Networks said the core manager of TeamPCP uses the “ResoluteXBF” handle on multiple platforms. The cybersecurity firm is also tracking two additional core members: “diencracked” and “Shinigami.”

If TeamPCP is primarily run by one person, law enforcement has a rare opportunity to make a lasting impact with a single arrest.

TeamPCP has collaborated with other cybercriminals, but most of those partnerships were short-lived and ended in a public feud or otherwise failed to get off the ground in any meaningful way, Goody said.

Researchers have linked TeamPCP to extortion crews, dark web forums and affiliates including Lapsus$, ShinyHunters, Vect, DragonForce, BreachForums and “HasanBroker.” TeamPCP listed about 4,000 private code repositories on a dark web forum with an asking price of $95,000.

The actions to date, including unpredictable behavior, indicate motivations beyond financial gain and a “clear desire for notoriety,” Goody said. “They seem to like to make chaos.”

Quist draws the same conclusion from his months-long investigation, noting that it encourages other cybercriminals to get in on the action, at one point offering financial rewards for the largest software supply-chain attack. 

TeamPCP isn’t in the game for extortion payments, he said. “These actors are more interested in the underground street cred they are gaining” and “causing as much damage and mayhem as possible.”

Victims abound, but exposure limited

TeamPCP has been remarkably noisy, opportunistically injecting malware into open-source software for the purpose of stealing credentials for Kubernetes environments, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and many other connected services.

The group’s claimed victim list is staggering: Checkmarx, Bitwarden, LiteLLM, Telnyx, Mercor AI, PyTorch Lightning, AntV, SAP, GitHub, TanStack, UiPath, MistralAI, Microsoft DurableTask, Red Hat and Nx Console.

The full collection of packages compromised or poisoned by TeamPCP to date accounts for roughly 500 million weekly downloads combined, according to Quist.

While the breadth of potential downstream compromise flowing from those downloads is substantial, many endpoints infected with those malware-riddled packages aren’t exposed to the internet and less susceptible to attack, he added.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a very extremely large number of victims,” Quist said. “There’s going to be a lot of people who potentially could be compromised and have potentially vulnerable packages in their environment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in an exploitable position.”

While these incidents have grabbed headlines, TeamPCP hasn’t accumulated payouts nearly as large as other cybercriminals. The broader reputational impact it has wrought, however, is massive.

TeamPCP has publicly claimed more than 10,000 victims and about $90,000 in extortions, according to Quist.

“They might not be making a lot of money, but they are causing a lot of impact,” Goody said. “Their campaigns have been very disruptive.”

How TeamPCP’s operating model targets development

TeamPCP’s victim list has grown as its hijacked open-source repositories on npm, PyPI, GitHub and other outsourced developer tools that are incorporated into upstream code running in production environments.

Developer laptops and other endpoints that are assigned to install, build and publish software widely contain keys and access to source code that create incredibly valuable supply-chain targets for attackers, Amitai Cohen, head of the attack vector intel team at Wiz, explained during a June presentation on TeamPCP at SleuthCon in Arlington, Va. 

The group targets CI runners, which are automated systems that build, test, and publish code. TeamPCP injects malware into the code repositories these runners maintain. When other developers pull that code into their own systems, they unknowingly download the malware alongside it. 

Some of these artifacts, including Python libraries, npm registries and GitHub Actions, are downloaded almost immediately by thousands or millions of developers who’ve set their runners up to consistently pull the latest version, according to Cohen. “We as a security industry have taught them that that is the right thing to do. You want to use the latest version because you want to be protected against vulnerabilities, and obviously you want to benefit from all the latest features.”

That instinct is exactly what TeamPCP exploits. By compromising one company’s CI/CD workflow, the group gains access to every downstream user who automatically pulls that infected code. “This is what allows [TeamPCP] to leverage initial access to some patient zero, some company that had a vulnerability in their CI/CD workflow, in order to gain access to their downstream users,” Cohen said. “That’s just how the software supply chain works. Everything has dependencies upon dependencies upon dependencies.”

Some of the packages compromised by TeamPCP were live for almost 13 hours, but security practitioners have responded by identifying code-injection attacks much quicker now, pulling some compromised repositories within 15 minutes, said Ben Read, director of strategic intelligence at Wiz.

The threat group’s operations remain high-tempo. TeamPCP infects new software packages almost daily, validates compromises and captures sensitive data within 24 hours, according to Wiz researchers.

The threat group has consistently evolved its tactics, developing payloads in JavaScript and Python while spreading from local files to Kubernetes application programming interfaces and bundled software development kits. Most recently, it’s been stealing credentials via custom protocols. 

The group’s ambitions have expanded beyond its own attacks. TeamPCP is also responsible for a self-replicating piece of malware known as Mini Shai-Hulud, which infected hundreds of software packages across open-source registries in back-to-back attack sprees last month. A TeamPCP affiliate published the full source code for the malware on GitHub last month and encouraged other cybercriminals to use it for their own campaigns.

“TeamPCP is going for volume. They are not being discriminating, they’re not necessarily trying to be stealthy or trying to maximize ROI. They’re going for an all-of-the-above strategy,” Read said during the Sleuthcon presentation.

Defensive gaps create openings for attack

TeamPCP’s attack spree has also underscored how difficult it is for organizations to revoke compromised secrets. Multiple victims have experienced recurring infections, sometimes falling prey to TeamPCP three times within a month, because they didn’t rotate secrets properly, Cohen said. 

At its core, these attacks highlight a direct trade-off organizations accept when they update software quickly to fix vulnerabilities, but learn that doing so too quickly could expose them to illegitimate registries containing malware.

TeamPCP has targeted what Aboukhadijeh describes as a “public good,” open-source registries that were never perfect but widely trusted and rarely turned into a point of entry for supply-chain attacks. 

Rapid open source software installation is one of the most dangerous things an organization can do right now, he said, adding that there’s a roughly 1 in 10 chance that any package installed by an organization could trigger an active attack. 

TeamPCP has compromised security scanners, password managers, automation tools, data visualization software, and CI/CD infrastructure across various environments.

And it’s lifted a trove of credentials and other sensitive data from victims.

Researchers like Cohen at Wiz, who have been tracking this attack spree since the beginning, are nearing a breaking point. 

“This is also too hard on us. We’re very tired. I’m sure a lot of people working on this problem space are very tired, and it’s just kind of become untenable,” Cohen said.

“You can’t keep existing in a world where you wake up every morning and some super prevalent package is compromised and everybody’s just going to be using it like nothing,” he added. “We need to start taking this a bit more seriously.”

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Security researchers chained together five separate weaknesses in the popular workflow automation service Zapier that, if first discovered by a malicious actor, could have granted access to millions of user accounts and the systems those accounts connect to.

The flaws, disclosed by security firm Token Security, did not require malware or insider access. The only prerequisite, according to the company’s report, was a free Zapier account. From there, researchers chained together weaknesses that, if taken individually, would have looked routine, but together opened a path to one of the most widely used services of the modern internet.

Zapier’s software can be configured to move data between email, customer-relationship tools, payment processors, calendars, code repositories and thousands of other applications. The company says it supports more than 8,000 third-party integrations and has millions of users, which means breaking into Zapier could escalate into a wide-ranging supply-chain attack.

The researchers said an attempted attack would start by exploiting a weakness in how users write small pieces of code as part of their automations. Once that feature was isolated, researchers recovered login credentials the service had tried to discard. Those credentials, in turn, exposed an internal storage system holding more than 1,100 of Zapier’s private software images, one of which contained a publishing key for a piece of code that runs inside every logged-in Zapier user’s browser.

According to the report, if an attacker updated that code, they could have acted as a legitimate user inside the platform, creating new automations, altering existing ones, and tapping into connections the user had already approved to outside services. From there, they could instruct the platform to send emails, move files, pull records from customer databases, or post messages, all from accounts that appeared entirely legitimate.

The researchers stressed that a possible attacker could not have obtained passwords or login keys for those connected services, as those remain on Zapier’s servers. But because the actions would have been carried out through Zapier itself, they would have looked, to any outside system, like the user’s own.

A separate finding, uncovered during the same research, illustrated how immediate that risk can be. The researchers said they discovered a working key tied to the personal account of the chief technology officer of an outside artificial-intelligence company whose software Zapier used internally. Using that key, they were able to send an email from the executive’s own Gmail account to a mailbox they controlled.

Token Security told Zapier the capability existed but did not exploit it. The researchers confirmed they had the access needed to push a malicious update into code running inside every signed-in Zapier user’s browser, and instead reported the findings in February under the company’s bug-bounty program. 

Researchers said that Zapier triaged the issues within four days, remediated within three weeks, and worked with the company to allow disclosure. The company paid the program’s maximum bounty of $3,000 and says it has no evidence the weaknesses were exploited before they were patched.

“Worth saying out loud in a culture that often punishes disclosure programs for slowness,” Token’s blog post reads.  

Zapier did not respond to CyberScoop’s request for comment. 

The episode lands at a moment when automation platforms and artificial-intelligence tools are increasingly being granted the standing authority to act on behalf of users across dozens of services at once. Token Security’s researchers argued that the weaknesses they found were not unique to Zapier. Each link in the chain, they said, was a well-documented kind of mistake. The vulnerability was the chain itself, and the same pattern, they warned, almost certainly exists at other companies that have not yet looked.

Zapier says the issues have been fixed and no further action is required. But the researchers suggested organizations with heightened sensitivity review their automation logs for anything they did not create, and consider reauthorizing Zapier connections to particularly sensitive systems.

You can read the full research report on Token Security’s website. 

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GitHub said late Tuesday that internal repositories were exfiltrated after an employee device was compromised through a poisoned Visual Studio Code extension, an incident that underscores the growing risks facing software development platforms and the ecosystems built around third-party developer tools.

The Microsoft-owned company said in posts on X that it detected and contained the compromise, removed the malicious extension version, isolated the affected endpoint and began an incident response investigation. The company’s current assessment is that the activity involved GitHub-internal repositories only.

GitHub also said a claim from TeamPCP, a hacking group behind attacks targeting software development packages, that 3,800 repositories were impacted was “directionally consistent” with its investigation so far. It said critical secrets were rotated Tuesday, with the highest-impact credentials prioritized first. The company said it continued to analyze logs, validate secret rotation and monitor for follow-on activity.

The company has not publicly named the extension involved or attributed the activity to a particular group. TeamPCP reportedly advertised the material for sale on a cybercrime forum and threatened to release it if no buyer emerged. 

Information surfaced Wednesday that the incident may be related to a separate issue with Nx Console, a Visual Studio Code tool that helps engineering teams organize large codebases, coordinate build pipelines and run tests efficiently. According to a security advisory posted on GitHub, one of the Nx Console maintainers was compromised in a prior security incident that leaked their GitHub credentials. An attack then used those credentials to push a malicious version of the extension to the VS Code Marketplace. Those credentials have since been temporarily revoked.

With millions of installs, Nx Console is a fixture of professional JavaScript development. It is exactly the kind of tool that sits deep inside a developer’s working environment, which would have direct access to source code, credentials and build systems.

NX CEO Jeff Cross posted on X Wednesday that his company has been working with Microsoft to determine the full scope of the incident.

“Initially, Microsoft indicated to us that there were 28 installs of the malicious version 18.95.0. Based on our own analytics for the compromised version, we currently believe the number of users who received the malicious package may be significantly higher; potentially over 6k installs,” the post reads.

“This is my top priority right now,” Cross continued. “Our team has been, and continues to be focused on understanding exactly what happened, helping affected users, hardening our systems and release processes, and being as transparent as possible throughout the investigation.”

The episode also follows a series of supply chain attacks involving npm, PyPI, Docker and other developer ecosystems. In those incidents, attackers have often targeted maintainers, packages or credentials rather than attacking end users directly. The multiple attacks show how fragile development environments have become as threat actors increasingly target them. A single compromised developer account, package, extension or build process can create access to many downstream systems.

GitHub has said it has no evidence that customer data stored outside the affected repositories was affected.

Visual Studio Code extensions are widely used by developers to add functions to Microsoft’s code editor, including support for programming languages, testing tools, cloud services and artificial intelligence assistants. Because these extensions often operate inside development environments, a malicious or compromised extension can be positioned close to source code, credentials and build systems.

“The thing people underestimate about VS Code extensions is that they have full access to everything on the developer’s machine,” Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido Security, told CyberScoop. “EDR doesn’t cover this layer at all. What’s missing for most organisations is any kind of visibility into what’s actually running on developer machines and the ability to control it.”

Trojanized extensions have appeared in the VS Code Marketplace before. Security researchers have identified malicious extensions posing as legitimate development tools, including packages used to steal credentials, mine cryptocurrency or exfiltrate data. Some have accumulated large installation counts before removal, reflecting the difficulty of policing open plugin ecosystems at scale.

For GitHub, the breach comes amid broader scrutiny of the security of developer infrastructure. The platform sits at the center of software production for companies, governments, open-source maintainers and independent developers. Its internal systems and code are of obvious interest to attackers because GitHub’s services support code hosting, package distribution, automation and identity workflows across much of the software industry.

GitHub said it would publish a fuller report when the investigation is complete.

Update: May 20, 12:55 p.m.: This story has been updated with information about a related security incident with Nx Console.

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