Trivy Vulnerability Scanner Hacked via Supply Chain Attack: What You Need to Know

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.
According to Trivy’s maintainers, credential rotation was performed after the initial disclosure on March 1. However, the rotation was not atomic, allowing the attacker to potentially use a valid token to exfiltrate newly rotated secrets during the rotation window.

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.



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