Statistics across all threats

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked has been decreasing since the beginning of 2024. In Q4 2025, it was 19.7%. Over the past three years, the percentage has decreased by 1.36 times, and by 1.25 times since Q4 2023.

Regionally, in Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked ranged from 8.5% in Northern Europe to 27.3% in Africa.

Four regions saw an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked. The most notable increases occurred in Southern Europe and South Asia. In Q3 2025, East Asia experienced a sharp increase triggered by the local spread of malicious scripts, but the figure has since returned to normal.

Feature of the quarter: worms in email

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which wormsinemailattachments were blocked increasedinallregions of the world.

Many of the blocked threats were related to the worm Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm. This malware is designed to persist on the system and then remotely control it.

Interestingly, this threat was not detected on ICS computers in the previous quarter, yet it appeared in all regions in Q4 2025.

A study found that the active spread of Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm via phishing emails was likely linked to the use by hackers of another malware obfuscation technique that was actively used during massive phishing campaigns in Q4 2025. These campaigns have been known since 2024 as “Curriculum-vitae-catalina”.

The attackers distributed phishing emails to HR managers, recruiters, and employees responsible for hiring. The messages were disguised as responses from job applicants with subjects such as “Resume” or “Attached Resume” and contained a malicious executable file under the guise of a curriculum vitae. Typically, the file was named Curriculum Vitae-Catalina.exe. When executed, it infected the system.

In Q4 2025, the threat spread across regions in two waves — one in October and another in November. Russia, Western Europe, South America, and North America (Canada) were attacked in October. A spike in Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm blocking was observed in other regions in November. The attack subsided in all regions in December.

The highest percentage of ICS computers on which Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm was blocked was observed in regions where threats from email clients had been historically blocked at high rates on ICS computers: Southern Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

At the same time, in Africa, where USB storage media are still actively used, the threat was also detected when removable devices were connected to ICS computers.

Selected industries

The biometrics sector has historically led the rankings of industries and OT infrastructures surveyed in this report in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked.

These systems are characterized by accessibility to and from the internet, as well as minimal cybersecurity controls by the consumer organization.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased only in one sector: oil and gas. The corresponding figures increased in two regions: Russia, and Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

However, if we look at a broader time span, there is a downward trend in all the surveyed industries.

Diversity of detected malicious objects

In Q4 2025, Kaspersky protection solutions blocked malware from 10,142 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

In Q4 2025, there was an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which worms, and miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked. These were the only categories that exhibited an increase.

Main threat sources

Depending on the threat detection and blocking scenario, it is not always possible to reliably identify the source. The circumstantial evidence for a specific source can be the blocked threat’s type (category).

The internet (visiting malicious or compromised internet resources; malicious content distributed via messengers; cloud data storage and processing services and CDNs), email clients (phishing emails), and removable storage devices remain the primary sources of threats to computers in an organization’s technology infrastructure.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from various sources were blocked decreased. All sources except email clients saw their lowest levels in three years.

The same computer can be attacked by several categories of malware from the same source during a quarter. That computer is counted when calculating the percentage of attacked computers for each threat category, but is only counted once for the threat source (we count unique attacked computers). In addition, it is not always possible to accurately determine the initial infection attempt. Therefore, the total percentage of ICS computers on which various categories of threats from a certain source were blocked can exceed the percentage of computers affected by the source itself.

• In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from the internet were blocked decreased to 7.67% and reached its lowest level since the beginning of 2023. The main categories of internet threats are malicious scripts and phishing pages, and denylisted internet resources. The percentage ranged from 3.96% in Northern Europe to 11.33% in South Asia.
• The main categories of threats from email clients blocked on ICS computers were malicious scripts and phishing pages, spyware, and malicious documents. Most of the spyware detected in phishing emails was delivered as a password archive or a multi-layered script embedded in office document files. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked ranged from 0.64% in Northern Europe to 6.34% in Southern Europe.
• The main categories of threats that were blocked when removable media was connected to ICS computers were worms, viruses, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from removable media were blocked ranged from 0.05% in Australia and New Zealand to 1.41% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats that spread through network folders in Q4 2025 were viruses, AutoCAD malware, worms, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from network folders were blocked ranged from 0.01% in Northern Europe to 0.18% in East Asia.

Threat categories

Typical attacks blocked within an OT network are multi-step sequences of malicious activities, where each subsequent step of the attackers is aimed at increasing privileges and/or gaining access to other systems by exploiting the security problems of industrial enterprises, including OT infrastructures.

Malicious objects used for initial infection

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked decreased to 3.26%. This is the lowest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2022, and it has decreased by 1.8 times since Q2 2025.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked ranged from 1.74% in Northern Europe to 3.93% in Southeast Asia, which displaced Africa from first place. Russia rounded out the top three regions for this indicator.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious documents were blocked increased for three consecutive quarters. However, in Q4 2025 it decreased by 0.22 pp to 1.76%.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 0.46% in Northern Europe to 3.82% in Southern Europe. In Q4 2025, the indicator increased in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Western Europe.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked decreased to 6.58%. Despite the decline, this category led the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which they were blocked.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 2.52% in Northern Europe to 10.50% in South Asia. The indicator increased in South Asia, South America, Southern Europe, and Africa. South Asia saw the most notable increase, at 3.47 pp.

Next-stage malware

Malicious objects used to initially infect computers deliver next-stage malware — spyware, ransomware, and miners — to victims’ computers. As a rule, the higher the percentage of ICS computers on which the initial infection malware is blocked, the higher the percentage for next-stage malware.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which spyware, ransomware and web miners were blocked decreased. The rates were:

• Spyware: 3.80% (down 0.24 pp). For the second quarter in a row, spyware took second place in the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which it was blocked.
• Ransomware: 0.16% (down 0.01 pp).
• Web miners: 0.24% (down 0.01 pp), this is the lowest level observed thus far in the period under review.

The percentage of ICS computers on which miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked increased to 0.60% (up 0.03 pp).

Self-propagating malware

Self-propagating malware (worms and viruses) is a category unto itself. Worms and virus-infected files were originally used for initial infection, but as botnet functionality evolved, they took on next-stage characteristics.

To spread across ICS networks, viruses and worms rely on removable media and network folders and are distributed in the form of infected files, such as archives with backups, office documents, pirated games and hacked applications. In rarer and more dangerous cases, web pages with network equipment settings, as well as files stored in internal document management systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, resource management (ERP) systems and other web services are infected.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which worms were blocked increased by 1.6 times to 1.60%. As mentioned above, this increase is related to a global phishing attack that spread the Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm backdoor worm across all regions of the world. The percentage increased in all regions. The biggest increase (up by 2.16 times) was in Southern Europe. The malware was primary distributed through email clients, and Southern Europe led the way in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked.

The percentage of ICS computers on which viruses were blocked decreased to 1.33%.

AutoCAD malware

This category of malware can spread in a variety of ways, so it does not belong to a specific group.

After an increase in the previous quarter, the percentage of ICS computers on which AutoCAD malware was blocked decreased to 0.29% in Q4 2025.

For more information on industrial threats see the full version of the report.

Statistics across all threats

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked has been decreasing since the beginning of 2024. In Q4 2025, it was 19.7%. Over the past three years, the percentage has decreased by 1.36 times, and by 1.25 times since Q4 2023.

Regionally, in Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked ranged from 8.5% in Northern Europe to 27.3% in Africa.

Four regions saw an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked. The most notable increases occurred in Southern Europe and South Asia. In Q3 2025, East Asia experienced a sharp increase triggered by the local spread of malicious scripts, but the figure has since returned to normal.

Feature of the quarter: worms in email

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which wormsinemailattachments were blocked increasedinallregions of the world.

Many of the blocked threats were related to the worm Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm. This malware is designed to persist on the system and then remotely control it.

Interestingly, this threat was not detected on ICS computers in the previous quarter, yet it appeared in all regions in Q4 2025.

A study found that the active spread of Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm via phishing emails was likely linked to the use by hackers of another malware obfuscation technique that was actively used during massive phishing campaigns in Q4 2025. These campaigns have been known since 2024 as “Curriculum-vitae-catalina”.

The attackers distributed phishing emails to HR managers, recruiters, and employees responsible for hiring. The messages were disguised as responses from job applicants with subjects such as “Resume” or “Attached Resume” and contained a malicious executable file under the guise of a curriculum vitae. Typically, the file was named Curriculum Vitae-Catalina.exe. When executed, it infected the system.

In Q4 2025, the threat spread across regions in two waves — one in October and another in November. Russia, Western Europe, South America, and North America (Canada) were attacked in October. A spike in Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm blocking was observed in other regions in November. The attack subsided in all regions in December.

The highest percentage of ICS computers on which Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm was blocked was observed in regions where threats from email clients had been historically blocked at high rates on ICS computers: Southern Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

At the same time, in Africa, where USB storage media are still actively used, the threat was also detected when removable devices were connected to ICS computers.

Selected industries

The biometrics sector has historically led the rankings of industries and OT infrastructures surveyed in this report in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked.

These systems are characterized by accessibility to and from the internet, as well as minimal cybersecurity controls by the consumer organization.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased only in one sector: oil and gas. The corresponding figures increased in two regions: Russia, and Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

However, if we look at a broader time span, there is a downward trend in all the surveyed industries.

Diversity of detected malicious objects

In Q4 2025, Kaspersky protection solutions blocked malware from 10,142 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

In Q4 2025, there was an increase in the percentage of ICS computers on which worms, and miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked. These were the only categories that exhibited an increase.

Main threat sources

Depending on the threat detection and blocking scenario, it is not always possible to reliably identify the source. The circumstantial evidence for a specific source can be the blocked threat’s type (category).

The internet (visiting malicious or compromised internet resources; malicious content distributed via messengers; cloud data storage and processing services and CDNs), email clients (phishing emails), and removable storage devices remain the primary sources of threats to computers in an organization’s technology infrastructure.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from various sources were blocked decreased. All sources except email clients saw their lowest levels in three years.

The same computer can be attacked by several categories of malware from the same source during a quarter. That computer is counted when calculating the percentage of attacked computers for each threat category, but is only counted once for the threat source (we count unique attacked computers). In addition, it is not always possible to accurately determine the initial infection attempt. Therefore, the total percentage of ICS computers on which various categories of threats from a certain source were blocked can exceed the percentage of computers affected by the source itself.

• In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from the internet were blocked decreased to 7.67% and reached its lowest level since the beginning of 2023. The main categories of internet threats are malicious scripts and phishing pages, and denylisted internet resources. The percentage ranged from 3.96% in Northern Europe to 11.33% in South Asia.
• The main categories of threats from email clients blocked on ICS computers were malicious scripts and phishing pages, spyware, and malicious documents. Most of the spyware detected in phishing emails was delivered as a password archive or a multi-layered script embedded in office document files. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked ranged from 0.64% in Northern Europe to 6.34% in Southern Europe.
• The main categories of threats that were blocked when removable media was connected to ICS computers were worms, viruses, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from removable media were blocked ranged from 0.05% in Australia and New Zealand to 1.41% in Africa.
• The main categories of threats that spread through network folders in Q4 2025 were viruses, AutoCAD malware, worms, and spyware. The percentage of ICS computers on which threats from network folders were blocked ranged from 0.01% in Northern Europe to 0.18% in East Asia.

Threat categories

Typical attacks blocked within an OT network are multi-step sequences of malicious activities, where each subsequent step of the attackers is aimed at increasing privileges and/or gaining access to other systems by exploiting the security problems of industrial enterprises, including OT infrastructures.

Malicious objects used for initial infection

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked decreased to 3.26%. This is the lowest quarterly figure since the beginning of 2022, and it has decreased by 1.8 times since Q2 2025.

Regionally, the percentage of ICS computers on which denylisted internet resources were blocked ranged from 1.74% in Northern Europe to 3.93% in Southeast Asia, which displaced Africa from first place. Russia rounded out the top three regions for this indicator.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious documents were blocked increased for three consecutive quarters. However, in Q4 2025 it decreased by 0.22 pp to 1.76%.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 0.46% in Northern Europe to 3.82% in Southern Europe. In Q4 2025, the indicator increased in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Western Europe.

The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious scripts and phishing pages were blocked decreased to 6.58%. Despite the decline, this category led the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which they were blocked.

Regionally, the percentage ranged from 2.52% in Northern Europe to 10.50% in South Asia. The indicator increased in South Asia, South America, Southern Europe, and Africa. South Asia saw the most notable increase, at 3.47 pp.

Next-stage malware

Malicious objects used to initially infect computers deliver next-stage malware — spyware, ransomware, and miners — to victims’ computers. As a rule, the higher the percentage of ICS computers on which the initial infection malware is blocked, the higher the percentage for next-stage malware.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which spyware, ransomware and web miners were blocked decreased. The rates were:

• Spyware: 3.80% (down 0.24 pp). For the second quarter in a row, spyware took second place in the rankings of threat categories in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which it was blocked.
• Ransomware: 0.16% (down 0.01 pp).
• Web miners: 0.24% (down 0.01 pp), this is the lowest level observed thus far in the period under review.

The percentage of ICS computers on which miners in the form of executable files for Windows were blocked increased to 0.60% (up 0.03 pp).

Self-propagating malware

Self-propagating malware (worms and viruses) is a category unto itself. Worms and virus-infected files were originally used for initial infection, but as botnet functionality evolved, they took on next-stage characteristics.

To spread across ICS networks, viruses and worms rely on removable media and network folders and are distributed in the form of infected files, such as archives with backups, office documents, pirated games and hacked applications. In rarer and more dangerous cases, web pages with network equipment settings, as well as files stored in internal document management systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, resource management (ERP) systems and other web services are infected.

In Q4 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which worms were blocked increased by 1.6 times to 1.60%. As mentioned above, this increase is related to a global phishing attack that spread the Backdoor.MSIL.XWorm backdoor worm across all regions of the world. The percentage increased in all regions. The biggest increase (up by 2.16 times) was in Southern Europe. The malware was primary distributed through email clients, and Southern Europe led the way in terms of the percentage of ICS computers on which threats from email clients were blocked.

The percentage of ICS computers on which viruses were blocked decreased to 1.33%.

AutoCAD malware

This category of malware can spread in a variety of ways, so it does not belong to a specific group.

After an increase in the previous quarter, the percentage of ICS computers on which AutoCAD malware was blocked decreased to 0.29% in Q4 2025.

For more information on industrial threats see the full version of the report.

An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the “Bundeskriminalamt” or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian — 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk — extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage.

Germany’s BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion — charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data.

Shchukin’s name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang’s activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency.

The GandCrab ransomware affiliate program first surfaced in January 2018, and paid enterprising hackers huge shares of the profits just for hacking into user accounts at major corporations. The GandCrab team would then try to expand that access, often siphoning vast amounts of sensitive and internal documents in the process. The malware’s curators shipped five major revisions to the GandCrab code, each corresponding with sneaky new features and bug fixes aimed at thwarting the efforts of computer security firms to stymie the spread of the malware.

On May 31, 2019, the GandCrab team announced the group was shutting down after extorting more than $2 billion from victims. “We are a living proof that you can do evil and get off scot-free,” GandCrab’s farewell address famously quipped. “We have proved that one can make a lifetime of money in one year. We have proved that you can become number one by general admission, not in your own conceit.”

The REvil ransomware affiliate program materialized around the same as GandCrab’s demise, fronted by a user named UNKNOWN who announced on a Russian cybercrime forum that he’d deposited $1 million in the forum’s escrow to show he meant business. By this time, many cybersecurity experts had concluded REvil was little more than a reorganization of GandCrab.

UNKNOWN also gave an interview to Dmitry Smilyanets, a former malicious hacker hired by Recorded Future, wherein UNKNOWN described a rags-to-riches tale unencumbered by ethics and morals.

“As a child, I scrounged through the trash heaps and smoked cigarette butts,” UNKNOWN told Recorded Future. “I walked 10 km one way to the school. I wore the same clothes for six months. In my youth, in a communal apartment, I didn’t eat for two or even three days. Now I am a millionaire.”

As described in The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, UNKNOWN and REvil reinvested significant earnings into improving their success and mirroring practices of legitimate businesses. The authors wrote:

“Just as a real-world manufacturer might hire other companies to handle logistics or web design, ransomware developers increasingly outsourced tasks beyond their purview, focusing instead on improving the quality of their ransomware. The higher quality ransomware—which, in many cases, the Hunting Team could not break—resulted in more and higher pay-outs from victims. The monumental payments enabled gangs to reinvest in their enterprises. They hired more specialists, and their success accelerated.”

“Criminals raced to join the booming ransomware economy. Underworld ancillary service providers sprouted or pivoted from other criminal work to meet developers’ demand for customized support. Partnering with gangs like GandCrab, ‘cryptor’ providers ensured ransomware could not be detected by standard anti-malware scanners. ‘Initial access brokerages’ specialized in stealing credentials and finding vulnerabilities in target networks, selling that access to ransomware operators and affiliates. Bitcoin “tumblers” offered discounts to gangs that used them as a preferred vendor for laundering ransom payments. Some contractors were open to working with any gang, while others entered exclusive partnerships.”

REvil would evolve into a feared “big-game-hunting” machine capable of extracting hefty extortion payments from victims, largely going after organizations with more than $100 million in annual revenues and fat new cyber insurance policies that were known to pay out.

Over the July 4, 2021 weekend in the United States, REvil hacked into and extorted Kaseya, a company that handled IT operations for more than 1,500 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. The FBI would later announce they’d infiltrated the ransomware group’s servers prior to the Kaseya hack but couldn’t tip their hand at the time. REvil never recovered from that core compromise, or from the FBI’s release of a free decryption key for REvil victims who couldn’t or didn’t pay.

Shchukin is from Krasnodar, Russia and is thought to reside there, the BKA said.

“Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia,” the BKA advised. “Travel behaviour cannot be ruled out.”

There is little that connects Shchukin to UNKNOWN’s various accounts on the Russian crime forums. But a review of the Russian crime forums indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows there is plenty connecting Shchukin to a hacker identity called “Ger0in” who operated large botnets and sold “installs” — allowing other cybercriminals to rapidly deploy malware of their choice to thousands of PCs in one go. However, Ger0in was only active between 2010 and 2011, well before UNKNOWN’s appearance as the REvil front man.

A review of the mugshots released by the BKA at the image comparison site Pimeyes found a match on this birthday celebration from 2023, which features a young man named Daniel wearing the same fancy watch as in the BKA photos.

Update, April 6, 12:06 p.m. ET: A reader forwarded this English-dubbed audio recording from a ccc.de (37C3) conference talk in Germany from 2023 that previously outed Shchukin as the REvil leader (Shchuckin is mentioned at around 24:25).

A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran’s time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.

Experts say the wiper campaign against Iran materialized this past weekend and came from a relatively new cybercrime group known as TeamPCP. In December 2025, the group began compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm that went after exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Redis servers, and the React2Shell vulnerability. TeamPCP then attempted to move laterally through victim networks, siphoning authentication credentials and extorting victims over Telegram.

In a profile of TeamPCP published in January, the security firm Flare said the group weaponizes exposed control planes rather than exploiting endpoints, predominantly targeting cloud infrastructure over end-user devices, with Azure (61%) and AWS (36%) accounting for 97% of compromised servers.

“TeamPCP’s strength does not come from novel exploits or original malware, but from the large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques,” Flare’s Assaf Morag wrote. “The group industrializes existing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and recycled tooling into a cloud-native exploitation platform that turns exposed infrastructure into a self-propagating criminal ecosystem.”

On March 19, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack against the vulnerability scanner Trivy from Aqua Security, injecting credential-stealing malware into official releases on GitHub actions. Aqua Security said it has since removed the harmful files, but the security firm Wiz notes the attackers were able to publish malicious versions that snarfed SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes tokens and cryptocurrency wallets from users.

Over the weekend, the same technical infrastructure TeamPCP used in the Trivy attack was leveraged to deploy a new malicious payload which executes a wiper attack if the user’s timezone and locale are determined to correspond to Iran, said Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido. In a blog post published on Sunday, Eriksen said if the wiper component detects that the victim is in Iran and has access to a Kubernetes cluster, it will destroy data on every node in that cluster.

“If it doesn’t it will just wipe the local machine,” Eriksen told KrebsOnSecurity.

Aikido refers to TeamPCP’s infrastructure as “CanisterWorm” because the group orchestrates their campaigns using an Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) canister — a system of tamperproof, blockchain-based “smart contracts” that combine both code and data. ICP canisters can serve Web content directly to visitors, and their distributed architecture makes them resistant to takedown attempts. These canisters will remain reachable so long as their operators continue to pay virtual currency fees to keep them online.

Eriksen said the people behind TeamPCP are bragging about their exploits in a group on Telegram and claim to have used the worm to steal vast amounts of sensitive data from major companies, including a large multinational pharmaceutical firm.

“When they compromised Aqua a second time, they took a lot of GitHub accounts and started spamming these with junk messages,” Eriksen said. “It was almost like they were just showing off how much access they had. Clearly, they have an entire stash of these credentials, and what we’ve seen so far is probably a small sample of what they have.”

Security experts say the spammed GitHub messages could be a way for TeamPCP to ensure that any code packages tainted with their malware will remain prominent in GitHub searches. In a newsletter published today titled GitHub is Starting to Have a Real Malware Problem, Risky Business reporter Catalin Cimpanu writes that attackers often are seen pushing meaningless commits to their repos or using online services that sell GitHub stars and “likes” to keep malicious packages at the top of the GitHub search page.

This weekend’s outbreak is the second major supply chain attack involving Trivy in as many months. At the end of February, Trivy was hit as part of an automated threat called HackerBot-Claw, which mass exploited misconfigured workflows in GitHub Actions to steal authentication tokens.

Eriksen said it appears TeamPCP used access gained in the first attack on Aqua Security to perpetrate this weekend’s mischief. But he said there is no reliable way to tell whether TeamPCP’s wiper actually succeeded in trashing any data from victim systems, and that the malicious payload was only active for a short time over the weekend.

“They’ve been taking [the malicious code] up and down, rapidly changing it adding new features,” Eriksen said, noting that when the malicious canister wasn’t serving up malware downloads it was pointing visitors to a Rick Roll video on YouTube.

“It’s a little all over the place, and there’s a chance this whole Iran thing is just their way of getting attention,” Eriksen said. “I feel like these people are really playing this Chaotic Evil role here.”

Cimpanu observed that supply chain attacks have increased in frequency of late as threat actors begin to grasp just how efficient they can be, and his post documents an alarming number of these incidents since 2024.

“While security firms appear to be doing a good job spotting this, we’re also gonna need GitHub’s security team to step up,” Cimpanu wrote. “Unfortunately, on a platform designed to copy (fork) a project and create new versions of it (clones), spotting malicious additions to clones of legitimate repos might be quite the engineering problem to fix.”

Update, 2:40 p.m. ET: Wiz is reporting that TeamPCP also pushed credential stealing malware to the KICS vulnerability scanner from Checkmarx, and that the scanner’s GitHub Action was compromised between 12:58 and 16:50 UTC today (March 23rd).