Two alleged TeamPCP hackers arrested over global supply chain attacks

Two men from Western Australia have been charged after police allege they were part of TeamPCP, a cybercrime group that planted malicious code in open-source software, then used it to break into organizations around the world.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP), working with the FBI and Western Australia Police Force (WAPF), arrested a 21-year-old from Cottesloe and a 23-year-old from Mandurah on August 26.

The 21-year-old Cottesloe man was charged with eight offences, including possessing and supplying data for use in computer offences, unauthorized modification of data, failing to comply with a section 3LA order, and dealing with proceeds of crime worth $100,000 or more. The charges carry maximum penalties ranging from three to 20 years in prison.

The 23-year-old Mandurah man was charged with six computer-related offences, including possessing and supplying data for use in computer offences and unauthorized modification of data. The offences carry maximum penalties of up to five years in prison.

“These men are allegedly members of the cybercriminal group TeamPCP, whose malicious code potentially compromised more than a thousand organizations worldwide,” FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director, Brett E. Leatherman, said.

According to the AFP, the investigation started in April 2026 after several cyber threat assessment companies flagged a syndicate that had inserted malicious code into software hosted on an open-source repository. Developers who pulled that code into their own projects unknowingly spread it into systems across government, academia and the private sector.

Once inside those systems, the code let the group harvest sensitive data, including login credentials and authentication tokens. The AFP estimates the campaign hit more than 1,000 organizations worldwide, with over 500,000 credentials stolen and at least 300 gigabytes of data taken. Global remediation costs are estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Cybercrime syndicates are becoming increasingly organised and often operate like professional businesses,” noted AFP Commander Graeme Marshall.

Investigators say a large amount of seized data is still being examined, and they have not ruled out further arrests.

TeamPCP has allegedly been behind supply chain attacks on GitHub, Telnyx, LiteLLM, Aqua’s Trivy, Checkmarx’s KICS, TanStack, MistralAI and Red Hat, using their self-spreading Mini Shai-Hulud worm to steal credentials and infect further packages.

TeamPCP made headlines after being attributed to a self-replicating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud, which compromised more than 180 npm packages in September 2025 by stealing credentials and using them to spread to new packages automatically. It exfiltrated secrets to public GitHub repositories and turned victims’ private repos public.

“There are absolutely no indications that TeamPCP was behind the original S1ngularity and Shai-Hulud attacks we saw in the summer of 2025. However, they did clone the worm, and it became regularly reported that they were behind the Shai-Hulud attacks. I want to make it clear that they are distinct attacks. We still don’t know who was behind the original attacks, and we may never know,” Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote.

Eriksen described TeamPCP as difficult to categorize: neither a state actor, an organized cybercrime group, nor a purely ideological one.

“They were also not especially sophisticated. What made them dangerous was their ability to take public exploits, techniques, research, and malware ideas and operationalize them quickly,“ Eriksen added.