Github got Hacked by CATS

In May of 2026 and some time leading up to it, the cybersecurity industry has seen an absolute rampage of software supply chain attacks. There was a recent news article and headline from Wired that says a hacker group is poisoning open source code at an unprecedented scale. And this hacker group is called Team PCP. One of their most recent attacks actually affected GitHub themself, but I'm sure you have seen the headlines. You've heard the news. Software supply chain attacks are super duper sinister because the threat actor is taking legitimate software, applications, and programs that you might already use or depend on for software that you write in your organization, and they inject their own malware. You can think of some very well-known incidents in the past, like SolarWinds or 3CX or Axios that we saw just recently, when there is a new version of some software application or even library or dependency, there's an update that's available that is actually backdoored with a payload. And traditionally, this didn't used to happen all that often, but Team PCP is turning this into a pretty constant fire. The most recent incident last month in May that got the most headlines and alarm bells and sirens going off was when the supply chain attack affected GitHub. An internal GitHub developer installed a poisoned or that backdoored and malicious VS Code extension or Visual Studio Code extension, and Team PCP, the threat actors behind it, said, "Hey, out of the 4,000 GitHub internal repositories, they've seen at least 3,800 compromised repositories." This specific instance of the NX Console VS Code extension was covered really well by Step Security, so we'll have links to all of these down below in the video description. But the gist is here. This compromise occurred due to a recent supply chain attack via Team PCP that scraped one of our contributors GitHub tokens. Now, this has a ripple effect, right? This is downstream. The dominoes can fall because this developer for the NX software package and library, now that they're compromised, maybe the adversary could make changes to other things like the VS Code extension that other individuals, like some internal worker at GitHub, could pull down, install, and now they're infected. Team PCP really likes to have some sort of worm effect where other packages are affected based off of other things that might be installed or available within their GitHub repositories or other libraries or packages that they maintain. So, whether you realize it or not, you probably have heard of Team PCP and their escapades. In the first half of the year, they compromised Trivy, they compromised KICS, they compromised light LLM, Telnyx, and they've been beating up NPM, the Node Package Manager, and PyPI, the Python Package Index. While there have been so many of these software supply chain attacks nearly every other week, it's hard to keep up with for the security teams fighting fires all the time, and you kind of have to wonder, how does Team PCP do this? And I have to think to some extent, it's really their style, like their tradecraft, but their persona, their mentality in all this. Look, you can see some comments here. They're definitely going for big exposure. They really care about getting big attention. They want to make a little bit of a storm. They want to make a stink. They want to toot their own horn in sort of this chest-thumping braggadocio way. They're leaning into the meme with like oh, Matrix-style cascading ones and zeros, a reggae fusion soundtrack, and Team PCP, a big banner, the cat's hijacking your supply chain. With that, Team PCP literally has been active on Twitter or X. Like they created an account and they want to hang out amongst us normies. Of course, profile picture is a cat, handle PCP Cats, and say this account follows the Twitter terms of service. I don't sell or advertise any services here. I'm just a silly cat having fun on the interwebs. And last month, while they were frolicking in the fields of the fire that they've set to the software supply chain, they went ahead and open-sourced their Shai Halud worm. Now, I'm sure you've heard the internet screaming and shouting about the Shai Halud worm because, right, I know the Dune joke there about this sandworm, but that's how they've been propagating across one infected package or library or dependency and now moving into to compromise other installed packages or dependencies that you might maintain over on NPM or in your GitHub account. The meme here is crazy. These GitHub packages that were out and about to include the Shai Halud malware and campaign, I guess the caption was Shai Halud open-sourcing the carnage. Is it vibe-coded? Yeah. And you got to give the devil his due here to a certain extent, right? Does it work? Let the results speak. Like, who cares if it's vibe-coded if the effect is accomplished? Love, Team PCP. Aux Security had covered this, again link below in the video description, but here's the write-up. Shai Halud worm goes open-source. Their malware, what they wrote, they've just shared now on the open internet. Accessible, open-source on GitHub, funny enough now a later victim of their escapades. But the thing is that now anyone, like whatever copycat or anyone that just wanted to pull this off the shelf, could do that same amount of damage. These were the repositories, they aren't now taken down. They're no longer online. Some folks might have had a backup or mirrored it, but here it is. Look, is it vibe-coded? Yeah. Does it work? Yeah. Who cares if it's AI slop? It gets the job done. And they go through more of the investigation, some more of the details here. They're leaning into the meme. Look, haha, heehee, all the folks. They're alluding to cats. Here's a meow for that user boards and threads for cracking or buying and selling services, hacker for hire, data breaches, leaks, passwords, blah blah blah. So, last month on Breach Forums, Team PCP had posted. And they say, "In a Team PCP partnership or forum co-ownership thread, hello again Breach. I hope everyone is well. We're proud to announce the new team role as co-owners of this platform. I guess they're becoming co-owner, right? It's a management and staff for Breach Forums. They sign off all cutsey, best regards to PCP Cats and Hassan Broker is going, "Hey, welcome aboard." I guess he's now exiled. We can chat a little bit more about that. Everyone's like, "Hell yeah, all right, brothers in arms, cybercrime." And hey, the way that I'm tracking down a lot of these dark web posts and cybercrime shenanigans is thanks to Flare. Flare is an identity-first cyber threat intelligence platform and solution, and they are collapsing the gap between detection and real remediation. They have a huge amount of insight in the dark web and the cybercrime ecosystem. Think ransomware leak sites or Telegram chats or infostealer malware logs. So, what I've done is super simple. Honestly, just logging into their platform, hopping over to the events tab, and the global search tab basically lets you search for anything across their entire data set. And here we can see some folks screaming and shouting in the Jacuzzi Telegram here. They give you the link and the onion URLs if they're looking at any of the dark websites. And while you don't need to fire up the Tor browser or actually connect to them, you could just see what other shenanigans they're sharing right in the platform. Oh, but here's some more of the cybercrime whining, right? Hassan says Team PCP has been reselling some of the GitHub data even after he said he sold it. He's actively scamming his customers, and the plot gets even worse. Picture here that they include of Okay, yeah, the authentic full GitHub Team PCP leak from May 2026. Starting to ruffle some feathers though with Hassan and Team PCP not getting along. That brings us to the today timeline. We're over on Breach Forums just this past weekend on Saturday, Team PCP posts another Oh, signs of life amidst rumors while they've seemingly been away. Hello, Breach. I hope everyone is as It looks like Team PCP will no longer be working with Hassoun and instead continue operating on this branch of the forums. We observed him treat his staff very badly and we watched him get fished, lol. Anyone who takes themselves seriously and cares about their partners being capable operators would think it's a complete joke. Maybe he buys his own database back, no hard feelings, but this is just a neutral end of the Look, okay, um this is just the threat actor bickering that tends to happen, but it has been difficult for me as facing spokesperson to come online. Some people have taken this leave of absence as a sign that I or the team have been feted, like arrested. This is simply untrue and I have already checked in with partners to resolve this. This is a sign of life and I guess my way of clearing things. So, they're still kicking. So, we got the old sign off T from the PCP cats says I should be much more capable of responding now. And you see them chirping, whatever they do. Hey, look sexy Team PCP. It's just whatever. So, here's the thing. You know I like to make light of this, oh I don't know, threat actors chirping, cybercrime high school drama, stupid pictures of cats doing whatever they do and their shenanigans, but there is real value amongst the noise for like genuine cyber threat intelligence. Here's the threat Oh, when they were selling the internal GitHub source code. Like being able to keep an eye on what these actors are up to is genuinely valuable. They're dropping these on LimeWire. What the heck? But like there's some tactical stuff here. A little bit of chest thumping bravado. Oh, hey, this is not a ransom. We don't care about extorting GitHub. One buyer and then we shred the data on our end. Apparently not according to Hassoun, hence the crap. It looks like our retirement is soon, so if no buyer will leak it for free. Turn offers like almost 100k, blah blah blah. I guess they kicked it over to Lapsus, so. Anyway, what I'm alluding to is that look, there is some signal in the noise about these threats, about these threat actors, about this activity, about these intrusions and malware that you probably want to be tracking. I'm not going to drag us down the rabbit hole of the step security article, but I feel like this is tactical and actionable because this includes the real indicators of compromise here. But between all the news headlines and advisories and reports and notifications and postmortem write-ups and CVE details. I don't know why they made a CVE for the supply chain attack. People screaming and shouting, regurgitating, rebroadcasting the same stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn, I don't know, cybercrime crap over on the dark web. Look, the reality is you don't need to care about all of the nonsense and you really should just be looking for like the signal to the noise, what actually matters to you and in your environment. And hey, Flare, you know I love them. Look, they've got this awesome setup with their threat flow where they could provide to you some sweet intelligence, tactical indicators of compromise, real TTPs, the MITRE attack mapping, the genuine signal to noise here. You could create your own if you ever wanted to based off of any sort of time period. But I wanted to pull up the one for Team PCP that they were tracking just some time ago. Look, this gives you I think the raw real facts. It's synthesizing across what they're tracking across those dark web locations and actually getting what matters for the domains, the IP addresses, the hashes, file system artifacts that you don't cover, MITRE attack techniques, and the things that arm you and your team to actually detect against the real threat. The coolest thing is that this is synthesizing all of these different reports so you don't have to. And a really awesome new thing that they've cooked up here is their intelligence solution. This basically lets you search for anything and everything in a much faster, better way. Let me go look for Team PCP here to get a little bit more tactical with what our conversation is. And here you can see the chatter on XSS when they open sourced the Shai Hulud. They're automatically analyzing this, getting the more tactical stuff like the GitHub repositories that are pertinent. And you can get a heck of a lot more granular with this given their filters where you can choose whether it's an actor, an attack pattern, a campaign, any specific thing like a vulnerability or CVE itself, the time that you're looking for, the metadata as to where you're pulling these from. And if I close out, I'll show you another one here like the Team PCP entry notes that, hey, we're actually synthesizing this article from Wiz with a grade of like, this is pretty reliable. These are all part of the STIX and TAXII sort of like protocols or standards or schemas that are used for threat intelligence. Pulling out some of the imagery, getting the threat context, these become actually actionable and valuable for you. One cool thing I wanted to be sure to mention is that they are partnering with Sequoia to be able to provide of these threat intelligence. So, big shout out and love to Sequoia just as well. Hey, Flare is the sponsor of this video, so huge shout out and thank you to them for their support. But hey, if you're interested to kick the tires, see this thing yourself, actually get access, they do have a two-week free trial and an awesome little exclusive here for us to be able for you to see Threat Flow and dive in and access all this just as well. And that is not included in the standard free trials. So, seriously, genuinely, thank you so much for your support, Flare. And I hope you go get a chance to play with it and see your organization's real exposure and their identity-first threat intelligence solution. Link below. With that, one last little tidbit here for you. While I'm on this train of actionable, actually valuable cyber threat intelligence, I know more often than not all those STIX and TAXII like protocols and things to collect indicators, artifacts, evidence, more often than not you funnel those into your tip or a threat intelligence platform. Just to see this all in action, I did stand up my own little local interface for OpenCTI or one open and accessible threat intelligence platform. And we can funnel in a lot of Flare's data there. Let me go ahead and log in here and I'm not going to spend too much time in OpenCTI, but I wanted to show it to you just because I know, look, this is very likely what you are really doing in your real environment. It doesn't have to be OpenCTI. It could be any sort of tip or threat intelligence platform, but look, I'll show you in the data and ingestion section here. Now, I'm able to go ahead and connect Flare as its own connector alongside Sekoya or any other connector that we might like, but this is pretty awesome because that will funnel in all of those artifacts and everything that Flare might give us. So, you don't have to always be in that platform, but realistically bring this into your own dashboard and environment. Here are some of those Sekoya entries. I want to track down maybe some of the events here. You can see incidents. Yeah, and a good many of these like look-alike domains for my own website. So, that's pretty cool to see my own indicators now in action and you could explore that for just about anything. I'm just pretty happy to see a actually centralized threat intelligence platform now that CTI is just so absolutely necessary for your security posture and your organization. All right, that's it. I've been rambling for way too long, but look, seriously, I hope there is some value in there in trying to like pull you out of the overwhelming sea of headlines and alerts and notifications and just finding truly the signal to noise for what matters to you. There are going to be more of these. There we saw a team PCP. Oh, the cats are back in action. Look, don't let yourself get caught up in the cycle. Just stay smart and ahead of it with real intel. Actionable, valuable that matters to you. Thanks so much for watching. See you in the next video.