An Undercover Google Analyst Infiltrated a Notorious Supply Chain Hacking Gang

An Undercover Google Analyst Infiltrated a Notorious Supply Chain Hacking Gang. Will KnightAn Undercover Google Analyst Infiltrated a Notorious Supply-Chain Hacking GangTeamPCP pulled off the worst-ever software supply-chain hacking spree and breached thousands of companies.

What happened

At times, the group deployed a worm known as Mini Shai-Hulud, named after the sandworms in Dune, to automate its hacking and scale up to even more victims. (The name also seemed to refer to an earlier Shai-Hulud worm that hackers designed to try a similar approach in September 2025, though it’s still not clear if TeamPCP or any of its alleged members were involved in that earlier intrusion campaign. )Larsen now says that in March, just as TeamPCP was beginning its frenzied supply-chain hacking, Google’s own undercover analyst was invited to join the hackers’ inner circle.

TeamPCP pulled off the worst-ever software supply chain hacking spree and breached thousands of companies. Now Google’s threat intelligence group says it had a mole inside the hackers’ inner circle. Now Google’s threat intelligence group has revealed that during a key moment of TeamPCP’s rampage, the company’s own undercover researcher had infiltrated the group—allowing Google to monitor the hacking spree from the inside, warn breach targets, and even help disrupt the group’s attempts to exploit those victims.

In a talk at security firm SentinelOne's LABScon research conference today, Google Threat Intelligence Group researcher Austin Larsen will present details on the company’s investigation—and infiltration—of TeamPCP amidst the group’s unprecedented, chaotic supply-chain hacking campaign. Google’s undercover analyst, Larsen says, gained access to a server where TeamPCP was storing its trove of credentials stolen from its many victims: the usernames, passwords, and access tokens it had obtained through its hacking and seemingly planned to use to extort target companies.

Around the same time, Larsen says, Google’s visibility into the TeamPCP internal chat also allowed it to learn that someone within the group’s core circle was, distinct from the group’s supply-chain hacking, using an AI tool to develop a zero-day exploit in a widely used piece of login software that would allow the hackers to bypass its two-factor authentication. Larsen was careful to note that Google’s undercover analyst inside of TeamPCP never engaged in any illegal hacking or even encouragement of the group’s breaches.

The wider picture

It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and even released a Dune-themed self-spreading worm to automate the process, ultimately breaching more than a thousand companies. And perhaps most surprisingly, Larsen says that Google’s security subsidiary Mandiant had an undercover analyst—not himself—within the group’s inner circle from almost the beginning of TeamPCP’s time in the spotlight. TeamPCP responded by narrowing its inner circle, moving its data to a new server, and exiling ShinyHunters and several other group members from its CanisterWorm chat, including Google’s undercover analyst.

The company also received intelligence from ShinyHunters, another infamous cybercriminal group that TeamPCP partnered with, but which later turned on the supply-chain hackers. The hacker group, which seems to have first appeared online in late 2025, had made headlines with a brazen string of cascading supply-chain attacks: It repeatedly compromised open-source software to hide its malware, which then allowed it to hijack the credentials of software developers and plant its malicious code in yet another widely used tool, in a repeating cycle.

Those repeated supply-chain attacks, with each enabling the group to cast its net again for more victims, ultimately allowed the hackers to breach open-source code repository Github, data contracting firm Mercor, and employee devices at OpenAI, the European Commission, and many others who have remained unnamed in public reporting. “You guys should understand that we pulled off the biggest supplychain [sic] maybe ever recorded in modern history,” one TeamPCP member wrote in the leaked chats.

Google’s team got a copy of the exploit code, tested it out, and found that, with a few tweaks, it worked—a rare instance of an in-the-wild AI-created hacking technique that took advantage of a previously unknown software vulnerability.

What has been reported

Google warned the software’s developer, who was able to patch its security flaw. (The incident was described in a case study Google released in May, but without naming TeamPCP or detailing how Google learned about the exploit. )More Betrayals, Sloppy OpsecGoogle’s analyst was not, it turns out, the only traitor in TeamPCP’s midst. Around April, a few weeks after partnering with TeamPCP, ShinyHunters went rogue, Larsen says, carrying out its own extortions with TeamPCP’s credentials but without giving the supply-chain hackers their cut.

“There are guardrails around what we do. ”But Larsen also notes that his team’s work to actively foil TeamPCP’s hacking is part of a new shift within Google. The investigation, after all, kicked off around the same time as Google’s newly launched Cyber Disruption Unit, which has been officially tasked with taking a more aggressive approach to combating cybercrime and state-sponsored hacking. Skip to main contentSave this storySave this storyBefore two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history.

According to Larsen, Google eventually followed a trail of operational security mistakes allegedly made by one of the two Australians now accused of being leading members of the hacker group and passed on key identifying details to law enforcement. “So essentially, almost day one, Mandiant was watching everything behind the scenes. ”The TeamPCP MoleLate last month, Ruben Ian Thomson and Louis Michael Gaebler, both Australians in their early twenties, were arrested by Australian police in a joint investigation with assistance from the FBI, charged with hacking crimes, and described by the Australian Federal Police (AFP)—in a press release that, due to Australian privacy laws, did not name them—as “principal participants” in TeamPCP.

Michael Fletcher, a former AFP analyst who now works in the threat research division of an Australian telecom firm, says he approached Larsen around that time about methods for monitoring the group’s members and activities.

What happens next

So Google’s team decided to take action to warn victims and prevent TeamPCP’s ransom scheme. That was my goal. ”Rather than focus on alerting the owners of the stolen credentials at victim companies directly, which Larsen says would have taken too long given the sheer number of breached companies, Google first reached out to providers where those credentials could be used, like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, to have the credentials revoked and prevent the hackers from exploiting them.

Even prior to Google’s disruption effort, Larsen says, the group struggled to profit from its enormous collection of stolen data, which, according to the AFP, included more than half a million users’ credentials. So in an attempt to better monetize its hacking, TeamPCP invited multiple other cybercriminal groups to partner with it, giving them access to the stolen credentials in exchange for a percentage of any extortion payments they were able to extract. ShinyHunters went so far as to share with Larsen, unsolicited, a full log of the group’s chat on TeamPCP’s server—not knowing that he already had access via Google’s mole.

An image ShinyHunters sent to Google’s Austin Larsen after the TeamPCP arrests, taking credit for helping with the operation and parodying a law enforcement seizure banner. After TeamPCP moved its stolen credentials to a server hosted by a different provider, Larsen says, Google was able to learn about some contents of the new server—through what Larsen describes as a “trusted partner”—and also that it was being backed up to a Google Drive on that same [email protected] account.