As organizations disclose breaches tied to TeamPCP's supply chain attacks, ShinyHunters and Lapsus$ are getting involved, taking credit, and creating a murky situation for enterprises.
The impact of TeamPCP's high-profile supply chain attacks is rapidly expanding — in more ways than one.
Following last month's spree of compromised open source projects, two victim organizations disclosed breaches related to the attacks this week. On Tuesday, AI startup Mercor said on social media platform X that it was "one of thousands of companies impacted by a supply chain attack involving LiteLLM."
And on Thursday, the EU's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) disclosed that a recent attack on the European Commission's cloud and Web infrastructure stemmed from the previously reported Trivy supply chain attack, also attributed to TeamPCP. According to CERT-EU, the EC inadvertently installed a compromised version of the Trivy code-scanning security tool, which allowed threat actors to harvest credentials and secrets that they later used to access the organization's Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment.
However, the plot thickens in terms of attribution: CERT-EU also confirmed the cybercriminal group ShinyHunters had published an exfiltrated data set on its leak site. Several days earlier, the group claimed it had obtained more than 91 GB of sensitive data such as emails, databases, and confidential documents from the EC.
Similarly, Lapsus$ — a cybercriminal group associated with ShinyHunters and the infamous Scattered Spider collective — had claimed to possess 4 TB of Mercor's internal data, including nearly a terabyte of the AI firm's source code. Dark Reading contacted Mercor for confirmation of the this claim but the company did not respond at press time.
In any event, the entry of third-party cybercrime groups into the equation has complicated matters for enterprises, as it's not clear how all of these groups came into possession of the overlapping stolen data. The situation has also raised the risk profile of the supply chain attacks, and experts say organizations need to address the expanding threats as soon as possible.
Specifically, Wiz researchers detailed how in several breaches of AWS environments, threat actors used the Trufflehog open source tool to find and validate stolen credentials. Then, TeamPCP performed reconnaissance of the environments before finally accessing various resources, such as S3 buckets and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) instances, to exfiltrate sensitive data.
Threat actors followed a nearly identical playbook in the European Commission breach, according to CERT-EU. After the organization downloaded a compromised version of Trivy, attackers stole an AWS API key that gave them control over AWS accounts. From there, they used Trufflehog to discover more AWS credentials, carried out reconnaissance activities, and then exfiltrated data from the environment.
The speed of the attack was perhaps even more concerning. According to CERT-EU's timeline, threat actors obtained the EC's API key on March 19 — the same day that TeamPCP began pushing compromised versions of Trivy. This was a day before the Trivy supply chain attack first came to light, and several days before Aqua Security, the maintainer of the open source scanner, officially disclosed the compromise.
Ensar Seker, CISO at SOCRadar, says "speed is the real lesson" from the TeamPCP supply chain attacks. "In practice, the response window is now measured in hours, not days," he says. "The biggest mistake would be to remove the malicious package but leave the stolen credentials usable, because by then the attackers may already be operating inside adjacent environments."
Instead, Seker says, organizations should immediately revoke and rotate exposed secrets, invalidate all tokens, and reissue cloud credentials. Additionally, security teams should review CI/CD runners, inspect GitHub Actions and package publishing workflows, and hunt for suspicious activity in their cloud and SaaS environments.
"What we are seeing looks less like a clean handoff between separate groups, and more like a convergence of cybercriminal ecosystems around the same access," Seker says.
While TeamPCP drove the initial supply chain compromises and credential theft, ShinyHunters and Lapsus$ are now showing up in the monetization and extortion layer, he says, though it's not clear how they obtained the stolen data. "At this stage, that does not prove formal operational alignment, but it does strongly suggest that once high-value access or stolen data emerges from a supply chain intrusion, other extortion actors can move in very quickly to amplify pressure, visibility, and potential profit," Seker says.
Muddying the waters further, TeamPCP has also announced a formal alliance with Vect, an emerging ransomware gang. That changes the risk calculus considerably, according to Tomer Peled, security researcher at Akamai.
"The fact that both teams are now working together raises the risk potential significantly," Peled tells Dark Reading. "Vect will now have access to potentially millions of victims who can be infected with their ransomware through TeamPCP's RAT."
As Akamai documented in a recent blog post, the compromised Telnyx PyPI package featured a three-stage remote access Trojan (RAT) that gives TeamPCP and Vect actors backdoor access to other organizations that downloaded the poisoned SDK. Additionally, given the volume of credentials already in TeamPCP's possession, Peled warns that more compromised libraries are likely to be discovered. "TeamPCP will use their stolen credentials to keep installing their RAT on as many victims as possible," he says.
Seker says the involvement of third-party threat groups should "absolutely" change how organizations view the risk of the TeamPCP supply chain attacks.
"The old assumption was that a software supply chain attack was mainly a downstream integrity problem," he says. "What these cases show is that it can become an immediate enterprise breach problem, where compromised packages lead to stolen secrets, cloud access, SaaS exposure, repository cloning, and then possible extortion by additional actors."
The impact of TeamPCP's high-profile supply chain attacks is rapidly expanding — in more ways than one.
Following last month's spree of compromised open source projects, two victim organizations disclosed breaches related to the attacks this week. On Tuesday, AI startup Mercor said on social media platform X that it was "one of thousands of companies impacted by a supply chain attack involving LiteLLM."
And on Thursday, the EU's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) disclosed that a recent attack on the European Commission's cloud and Web infrastructure stemmed from the previously reported Trivy supply chain attack, also attributed to TeamPCP. According to CERT-EU, the EC inadvertently installed a compromised version of the Trivy code-scanning security tool, which allowed threat actors to harvest credentials and secrets that they later used to access the organization's Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment.
However, the plot thickens in terms of attribution: CERT-EU also confirmed the cybercriminal group ShinyHunters had published an exfiltrated data set on its leak site. Several days earlier, the group claimed it had obtained more than 91 GB of sensitive data such as emails, databases, and confidential documents from the EC.
Similarly, Lapsus$ — a cybercriminal group associated with ShinyHunters and the infamous Scattered Spider collective — had claimed to possess 4 TB of Mercor's internal data, including nearly a terabyte of the AI firm's source code. Dark Reading contacted Mercor for confirmation of the this claim but the company did not respond at press time.
In any event, the entry of third-party cybercrime groups into the equation has complicated matters for enterprises, as it's not clear how all of these groups came into possession of the overlapping stolen data. The situation has also raised the risk profile of the supply chain attacks, and experts say organizations need to address the expanding threats as soon as possible.
TeamPCP's Expanding Cybercrime Influence
The disclosures from Mercor and the EC follow warnings from cybersecurity vendors that TeamPCP is weaponizing stolen credentials and secrets obtained in the supply chain attacks to access organizations' cloud infrastructure. In a blog post earlier this week, Wiz noted that its customer incident response team (CIRT) has observed and responded to "multiple attacks" in which TeamPCP actors used stolen credentials and secrets to access victims' AWS, Azure, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) instances.Specifically, Wiz researchers detailed how in several breaches of AWS environments, threat actors used the Trufflehog open source tool to find and validate stolen credentials. Then, TeamPCP performed reconnaissance of the environments before finally accessing various resources, such as S3 buckets and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) instances, to exfiltrate sensitive data.
Threat actors followed a nearly identical playbook in the European Commission breach, according to CERT-EU. After the organization downloaded a compromised version of Trivy, attackers stole an AWS API key that gave them control over AWS accounts. From there, they used Trufflehog to discover more AWS credentials, carried out reconnaissance activities, and then exfiltrated data from the environment.
The speed of the attack was perhaps even more concerning. According to CERT-EU's timeline, threat actors obtained the EC's API key on March 19 — the same day that TeamPCP began pushing compromised versions of Trivy. This was a day before the Trivy supply chain attack first came to light, and several days before Aqua Security, the maintainer of the open source scanner, officially disclosed the compromise.
Ensar Seker, CISO at SOCRadar, says "speed is the real lesson" from the TeamPCP supply chain attacks. "In practice, the response window is now measured in hours, not days," he says. "The biggest mistake would be to remove the malicious package but leave the stolen credentials usable, because by then the attackers may already be operating inside adjacent environments."
Instead, Seker says, organizations should immediately revoke and rotate exposed secrets, invalidate all tokens, and reissue cloud credentials. Additionally, security teams should review CI/CD runners, inspect GitHub Actions and package publishing workflows, and hunt for suspicious activity in their cloud and SaaS environments.
Multiple Threat Groups Converging on TeamPCP Attacks
If the speed of the attacks weren't enough, the situation has gotten murkier with the apparent involvement of Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters, the nature of which is unclear. According to an X post associated with the threat group, it appears TeamPCP is not collaborating with ShinyHunters and actively beefing with them."What we are seeing looks less like a clean handoff between separate groups, and more like a convergence of cybercriminal ecosystems around the same access," Seker says.
While TeamPCP drove the initial supply chain compromises and credential theft, ShinyHunters and Lapsus$ are now showing up in the monetization and extortion layer, he says, though it's not clear how they obtained the stolen data. "At this stage, that does not prove formal operational alignment, but it does strongly suggest that once high-value access or stolen data emerges from a supply chain intrusion, other extortion actors can move in very quickly to amplify pressure, visibility, and potential profit," Seker says.
Muddying the waters further, TeamPCP has also announced a formal alliance with Vect, an emerging ransomware gang. That changes the risk calculus considerably, according to Tomer Peled, security researcher at Akamai.
"The fact that both teams are now working together raises the risk potential significantly," Peled tells Dark Reading. "Vect will now have access to potentially millions of victims who can be infected with their ransomware through TeamPCP's RAT."
As Akamai documented in a recent blog post, the compromised Telnyx PyPI package featured a three-stage remote access Trojan (RAT) that gives TeamPCP and Vect actors backdoor access to other organizations that downloaded the poisoned SDK. Additionally, given the volume of credentials already in TeamPCP's possession, Peled warns that more compromised libraries are likely to be discovered. "TeamPCP will use their stolen credentials to keep installing their RAT on as many victims as possible," he says.
Seker says the involvement of third-party threat groups should "absolutely" change how organizations view the risk of the TeamPCP supply chain attacks.
"The old assumption was that a software supply chain attack was mainly a downstream integrity problem," he says. "What these cases show is that it can become an immediate enterprise breach problem, where compromised packages lead to stolen secrets, cloud access, SaaS exposure, repository cloning, and then possible extortion by additional actors."