Trivy Vulnerability Scanner Hacked via Supply Chain Attack: What You Need to Know
Aqua Security’s Trivy Vulnerability Scanner Hit by Supply Chain Attack
In late February, a threat actor compromised Aqua Security’s Trivy open-source vulnerability scanner.
Compromise Details
- The attack involved a GitHub Actions workflow issue.
- Some releases were deleted, and malicious versions of the application’s Visual Studio (VS) Code extensions were published to the Open VSIX marketplace.
The attackers used the compromised credentials to push a malicious Trivy release (version v0.69.4) that was distributed across all regular channels, including GitHub Container Registry, Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public, and Docker Hub.
Malicious Release
- The malicious release contained an information-stealing malware designed to dump the Runner.Worker process memory and extract all secrets from it.
- The malware was also capable of encrypting the harvested data and sending it to a remote server.
- If the exfiltration failed, it created a public GitHub repository and uploaded the data to it.
Additionally, the attackers targeted the setup-trivy releases, force-pushing all tags to malicious commits, leading to the same infostealer.
Remediation Efforts
- Trivy’s maintainers released clean iterations of Trivy (versions v0.69.2 and v0.69.3), trivy-action (v0.35.0), and setup-trivy (v0.2.6).
- Due to the original trivy-action tags being deleted during remediation, new tags with a ‘v’ prefix were published.
Users are urged to rotate all credentials, tokens, and other secrets if a compromised version of Trivy, trivy-action, or setup-trivy ran on their environments.
Attribution and Further Attacks
- Trivy’s maintainers have attributed the attack to a threat actor known as TeamPCP, which has expanded its activity following the Trivy compromise.
- TeamPCP has targeted the NPM ecosystem with the CanisterWorm malware, compromising over 45 NPM packages and injecting them with a post-install loader that fetches a persistent Python backdoor.
- This enables dynamic payload delivery via an ICP canister used for command-and-control (C&C) dead-drop.
CanisterWorm is capable of extracting NPM tokens, resolving usernames, enumerating published packages, creating new package versions, and publishing the payload across all of them.
TeamPCP’s Activity
- TeamPCP emerged in late 2025, targeting cloud-native infrastructure via exposed CI/CD pipelines, Docker APIs, and Kubernetes clusters.
- The threat actor is known for mounting supply chain attacks and leveraging credentials stolen from cloud workloads and GitHub Actions runners via memory scrapers.
