# Australia Arrests Two Alleged Leaders of the Shai-Hulud Worm Campaign

Page: https://hirantha.me/blog/australia-arrests-two-alleged-leaders-of-the-shai-hulud-worm-campaign
Published: 2026-08-29
Written by: hirantha.me Newsroom (AI-generated). An AI model wrote this from the sources listed below; how it is made: https://hirantha.me/about/newsroom
Topics: supply chain attack, npm security, shai-hulud worm, open source security, cybercrime arrest

> Australian and US police charged two Western Australian men accused of running TeamPCP, a group blamed for a worm that hit over 1,000 firms.

## Two men, three raids, one worm

On 26 August 2026, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the Western Australia Police Force and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed search warrants across three properties in Perth and arrested two men: a 21-year-old from the suburb of Cottesloe and a 23-year-old from Mandurah. Police have not formally named either suspect, but investigative reporting, including work by security journalist Brian Krebs that other outlets have since corroborated, identifies the 21-year-old as Ruben Thomson, who used the online handle "Ellis" and allegedly led the cybercrime group TeamPCP until March 2026. The 23-year-old has been reported elsewhere as Louis Michael Gaebler.

Both men appeared before Perth Magistrates Court and were charged with a combined set of computer offences, including unauthorized modification of data, possessing data with intent to commit an offence, and dealing with proceeds of crime exceeding $100,000. Between the two of them the charges carry maximum penalties as high as 20 years. The AFP has said further arrests and charges have not been ruled out.

## What TeamPCP is accused of doing

TeamPCP is the name investigators gave to the group behind Shai-Hulud, a self-propagating worm that spread through open source software repositories rather than through a single hacked network. According to the AFP, the campaign potentially compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide, stole in excess of 500,000 credentials, and exfiltrated at least 300 gigabytes of data. Investigators estimate remediation costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Outside researchers have added their own numbers to that picture. The threat intelligence firm Hudson Rock separately identified a 153 gigabyte archive of stolen material attributed to the attackers, and The Hacker News reported that researchers had traced impact to roughly 2,488 corporate domains, with 16 confirmed victims listed on a dedicated leak site. These figures come from different vantage points on the same campaign rather than components of one total, and none of the outlets that reported them treated them as additive.

## How the worm moved

Rather than breaking into targets one at a time, the alleged scheme worked by stealing publishing credentials for widely trusted open source packages, then pushing poisoned versions of those packages out through the projects' own official release channels. Once installed, Shai-Hulud harvested further credentials, particularly for GitHub and major cloud providers, and used them to compromise still more packages, letting the campaign spread across the npm (Node Package Manager) registry for JavaScript, the PyPI (Python Package Index) registry for Python, Docker Hub, OpenVSX and GitHub Actions. Named targets and affected projects reported across multiple outlets include GitHub itself, the telecom platform Telnyx, the AI gateway LiteLLM, Aqua Security's Trivy vulnerability scanner, Checkmarx's KICS static-analysis tool, the TanStack suite of web development libraries, Mistral AI and Red Hat.

## A campaign years in the making

Investigators say the infrastructure behind the operation traces back as far as 2020, though the publicly visible campaign accelerated much more recently. Researchers first spotted a wave hitting Trivy, KICS and LiteLLM in March 2026. On 12 May 2026, the worm's underlying framework was open-sourced, an act that made the technique easier for copycats to reuse. A fresh wave struck the popular npm packages keyv and cacheable on 4 August 2026, and the following day the security firm Oligo said it had traced the actors to a cluster it tracks as TA-NATALSTATUS, also known as IronErn. The AFP and FBI say their own investigation began in April 2026 after cyber threat assessment firms passed along information.

FBI Assistant Director Brett Leatherman said: "These men allegedly comprised TeamPCP, whose malicious code potentially compromised over a thousand organizations worldwide."

## What it means in practice

For most people, this case will not translate into a direct, personal warning the way a consumer data breach does. Its real audience is anyone who builds or maintains software that depends on open source packages, which today is most of the software industry. The practical lessons investigators and researchers have pointed to are the same ones raised after prior open source supply chain incidents: verify package versions against known-good hashes or lockfiles before upgrading, watch for unexpected publishes to dependencies that rarely change, rotate credentials that touch package registries and CI/CD pipelines, and treat a sudden new maintainer or a surprise release from a normally quiet project as a signal worth investigating rather than a routine update. Organizations that depend on any of the specifically named projects should check their own dependency trees against the affected version ranges those projects have since disclosed, rather than assuming the arrests alone close out their exposure.

The arrests do not end the story. With further charges not ruled out and a worm framework that is now public, the pattern of stolen publishing credentials being used to poison trusted packages is likely to keep showing up under other names even if TeamPCP itself is finished.

## Questions

**Who was arrested over the Shai-Hulud worm attacks?**
Australian, Western Australian and US federal police arrested two Western Australian men, aged 21 and 23, in Perth on 26 August 2026. Police have not formally named them, but reporting has identified the younger man as alleged TeamPCP leader Ruben Thomson and the other as Louis Michael Gaebler.

**What is TeamPCP and what is Shai-Hulud?**
TeamPCP is the name given to the group accused of running Shai-Hulud, a self-propagating worm that stole publishing credentials for trusted open source packages and used them to push poisoned versions through official release channels.

**How many organizations were affected?**
The Australian Federal Police estimate the campaign potentially compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide, with over 500,000 credentials stolen and at least 300 gigabytes of data exfiltrated.

**Which open source projects were targeted?**
Reported targets include GitHub, Telnyx, LiteLLM, Aqua Security's Trivy scanner, Checkmarx's KICS, the TanStack libraries, Mistral AI and Red Hat, spread across the npm, PyPI, Docker Hub, OpenVSX and GitHub Actions ecosystems.

**Is the case over now that arrests have been made?**
No. The Australian Federal Police have said further arrests and charges have not been ruled out, and the worm's underlying framework was open-sourced in May 2026, meaning the technique remains available to other attackers.

## Sources

- [Two Alleged 'TeamPCP' Hackers Arrested in Australia](https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/08/27/alleged-teampcp-hackers-arrested-australia/), Help Net Security
- [Australian cops cuff alleged TeamPCP masterminds](https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/28/australian_cops_cuff_alleged_teampcp_masterminds/5293157), The Register
- [Alleged TeamPCP Hackers Charged in Australia Over Major Supply Chain Attacks](https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/alleged-teampcp-hackers-charged-in.html), The Hacker News
- [Two Arrests, One Supply-Chain Attack, and a Lot of Stolen Credentials](https://securityaffairs.com/197929/security/two-arrests-one-supply-chain-attack-and-a-lot-of-stolen-credentials.html), Security Affairs
- [Shai-Hulud hackers: two men charged over TeamPCP's global supply chain crime spree that hit OpenAI, and thousands more](https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/shai-hulud-hackers-charged-teampcps), Bitdefender HotForSecurity