Supply Chain Busted: Australia Arrests TeamPCP Hackers Behind 3,800 GitHub Breaches
Tuesday, September 1, 2026 · 5-minute read
Australian federal police arrested two men from Western Australia — aged 21 and 23 — allegedly behind TeamPCP, a cybercrime group responsible for the longest-running supply chain attack spree on record. The group used a self-spreading worm called Shai-Hulud to plant malicious code in hundreds of open-source tools, stealing developer credentials and growing their access with every infection. They even ran a public contest offering $1,000 in Monero to whoever could compromise the most popular software packages — essentially recruiting new hackers on a performance bonus.
↗ Krebs on SecurityAn Iranian hacking group called Nimbus Manticore is sending fake job offers on LinkedIn and other job platforms, complete with a "coding challenge" that's actually malware. Once you open the test archive, two new remote access trojans called NodeRabbit and PollCat quietly install themselves — and both work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Victims have been spotted in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Ethiopia so far.
↗ The Hacker NewsBerlin's city administration has confirmed that the Rhysida ransomware gang is trying to extort the German capital after listing it on their public data leak site. The city hasn't said exactly what was stolen, but the listing means hackers are threatening to publish the data unless Berlin pays up. It's the latest in a string of attacks on European government bodies.
↗ BleepingComputerA technique called ClickFix was the number-one way hackers broke into companies last year, accounting for nearly half of all attacks tracked by Microsoft. Here's how it works: you visit a compromised website, a pop-up tells you to "verify you're not a robot," and while you're reading the instructions it secretly copies a malicious command to your clipboard. It then walks you through pasting it into your computer's terminal — at which point you've just handed attackers the keys. A new variant called TerminalFix uses fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA prompts to do exactly this. No suspicious attachments, no software flaw to patch — just social engineering that works because it asks nicely.
Researchers found 13 malicious software packages hidden inside themes used by Vietnamese movie and comic streaming sites. When iPhone users visit those sites on an unpatched iPhone, the hidden code exploits a flaw in WebKit — Apple's browser engine — to silently install spyware. The spyware's main goal is to steal your crypto wallet seed phrase, which would give attackers complete, permanent access to your cryptocurrency.
Nearly 22,000 Microsoft Exchange email servers sitting on the open internet are still unpatched against a serious flaw that lets attackers bypass login entirely — no password needed. Once in, an attacker can take over every email mailbox on that server: reading messages, sending emails impersonating staff, or using it as a launchpad for further attacks inside an organization's network.
Status: Patch available. If your organization runs its own Exchange server, your IT team needs to apply this update immediately. If you use Microsoft 365 (cloud-hosted email), you are not affected.
PaperCut, software that many schools, universities, and offices use to manage printers and track printing costs, has two security flaws that were already being used in real attacks before a fix was available. Attackers are now using these flaws to steal data. PaperCut has issued a second emergency patch this week as the situation develops.
Status: Emergency patch released. If your workplace or school uses PaperCut, flag this to your IT department today — the vendor has confirmed active data theft is happening against unpatched systems.
Hackers hijacked the update delivery system for Virtualizor, a popular tool used by web hosting companies to manage virtual servers. They used a technique called BGP hijacking to intercept update requests and serve malicious software instead of the real update. Any Virtualizor installation that auto-updated during the attack window may be compromised.
Status: Patch and advisory released by Virtualizor. If you or your hosting provider uses Virtualizor, verify the integrity of the current installation immediately.
Google's Android 17 adds support for a technology called ECH (Encrypted Client Hello), which closes a long-standing privacy gap in how phones connect to websites. Until now, even on HTTPS-secured sites, your internet provider or anyone monitoring your network could see exactly which website you were visiting — just not what you were doing there. ECH encrypts that initial connection handshake so outside observers only see that you're connecting somewhere, not where. It's a meaningful step for people on shared or monitored networks, like public Wi-Fi or workplace internet.
Imagine buying a jar of pasta sauce from a supermarket, only to find out the factory that made it had been secretly adding poison to every jar — and the same factory also supplied ingredients to dozens of other food brands. That's roughly what the TeamPCP hacking group did to the global software supply chain for almost a year, until Australian police arrested two of its alleged members this week.
TeamPCP's trick was elegant and brutal. They'd find a software developer's login credentials — often by sending a spear-phishing email — and use those credentials to publish malicious versions of open-source tools that developer maintained. Other developers would download those poisoned tools, get infected, and have their own credentials stolen. TeamPCP would then use those new credentials to poison more tools. The cycle kept feeding itself. Their worm, Shai-Hulud, automated the spread. By the time researchers caught on, the group had compromised over 3,800 code repositories on GitHub alone and harvested secrets from more than 2,500 organizations — including some of the world's biggest tech companies — via a single attack on an AI tool called LiteLLM.
What makes this story stick is how brazen the group was. They ran a public hacking contest on Telegram, offering cash prizes to whoever could compromise the most widely-downloaded packages. They taunted victims publicly on social media before the breaches were even reported. The leader, identified by Krebs on Security as 21-year-old George Prepakis, operated under the handle @kernelstub and posted a public invite link to the private chat server where the group coordinated — a mistake that investigators almost certainly used to map the entire network.
Two arrests don't end a story like this. TeamPCP is described less as a tight-knit gang and more as a loose community of skilled individuals who collaborated when it suited them. Other members remain unidentified. The tools they built — including Shai-Hulud's source code, which was published online in May — are still out there for anyone to copy. For regular people, the lesson is indirect but real: the apps and services you use every day are built on open-source components, and the security of those components depends on the safety of individual developers' email accounts. The weakest link in your bank's software might be a freelance coder's reused password.