A comprehensive analysis has revealed that the cybercrime group known as TeamPCP has been actively compromising internet-facing infrastructure since 2020, long before they shifted focus to software supply chain attacks. Researchers from Oligo Security, Avi Lumelsky and Gal Elbaz, uncovered overlapping domains, malware deployment paths, and other operational techniques linking TeamPCP to these activities.
In the latter half of 2025, two significant campaigns were attributed to TeamPCP: ShadowRay 2.0, which hijacked AI infrastructure to create a self-propagating botnet, and TA-NATALSTATUS, which targeted exposed Redis servers for cryptocurrency mining. These campaigns indicate that TeamPCP has been targeting internet-accessible technologies such as Ray, Docker, Redis, and React even before adopting their current moniker.
Notably, the group’s activities were first brought into the spotlight at the end of the previous year when they were connected to the exploitation of vulnerabilities in React Server Components and Next.js. This operation, dubbed Operation PCPcat, aimed to extract credentials and sensitive information from compromised environments.
In a massive campaign detailed by Flare earlier this year, TeamPCP targeted cloud native environments to establish a malicious infrastructure that facilitated data exfiltration, ransomware deployment, extortion, and cryptocurrency mining. This evolution into high-profile supply chain compromises involved exploiting the interconnectedness of modern software systems to infect developer environments through open-source libraries.
The research highlights strong operational links, such as overlapping identities in GitHub and GitLab during the ShadowRay 2.0 campaign and TeamPCP's subsequent actions. TeamPCP's tactics involve exploiting known vulnerabilities in React, Docker, Redis, and Ray, employing automated and self-propagating techniques. Their latest malware updates include the "kube.py" Python script, used in Kubernetes environments, which has evolved to incorporate destructive functionalities.
The findings suggest that TeamPCP is not a new entity but a continuation of an existing cybercriminal ecosystem, leveraging tried-and-tested methods to expand into software supply chain attacks.