Security
Alleged crew behind the Shai-Hulud worm and other supply chain attacks nabbed with help from the FBI
The Australian city of Perth is by some measures the world’s most isolated major metropolis, but is still sufficiently connected to US law enforcement authorities that the FBI was able to help Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) to find two men they believe were the masterminds of TeamPCP, a cybercrime crew that conducted prominent supply chain attacks.
According to the AFP, two men aged 21 and 23 arrested on Wednesday “were principal participants in the activities of the cybercrime syndicate and received payments in cryptocurrency for their roles in the illegal activity.”
An FBI Facebook post names one of the arrested men as Ruben Thomson and describes him as “the alleged leader of the cybercriminal group TeamPCP.” Australian media named the second man as 23-year-old Louis Michael Gaebler.
Investigations into the pair started in April 2026, after Australian authorities and the FBI “received information from multiple cyber threat assessment companies regarding a syndicate that allegedly inserted malicious code into software available on an open-source repository, which was then unwittingly used by other developers.”
Researchers detected some of those activities before April: In March, we reported that researchers spotted a supply chain attack on the open source scanner Trivy.
Another of TeamPCP’s attacks was the Shai-Hulud worm, which attacks npm packages, tries to infect them and goes looking for credentials to major public clouds or services like GitHub. If the worm burrowed into its targets, it would either try to replicate to continue its attacks, or wipe the environment out of spite.
The AFP’s “We cuffed ‘em!” announcement estimates that TeamPCP’s supply chain attacks “potentially compromised more than 1000 organisations globally, enabling the theft of more than 500,000 credentials, and the exfiltration of at least 300 gigabytes of data.” Australia’s Feds estimate “the financial impact includes global remediation costs estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars.”
As is often the case in such matters, the arrested men were found with electronic devices and other items which authorities seized.
“A large volume of data seized is being forensically examined and the investigation remains ongoing,” the AFP wrote, adding “Further arrests and charges have not been ruled out.” Indeed, the Feds note that they arrested the two at different locations in the suburbs of Perth and searched a third property nearby. ®
Bootnote: Perth is considered the site of the original “Black Swan” event, as swans there – and across much of Australia – are black. Early European explorers who explored Australia’s west coast were astounded when they saw the black birds, as the “fact” that all swans are white was at the time a metaphor for the existence of absolute truths.
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