Dear Internet,
Yesterday, I released a piece about how Shai-Hulud was one of the best things to happen to supply chain security. The thesis was very intentionally provocative. Because ultimately, the supply chain attacks we’ve seen over the last year, and especially over the last six months, have caused significant damage and disruption to companies and individuals alike.
The barrage of attacks we saw, especially from TeamPCP, caused incredible harm. Even if some of the long-term consequences may ultimately make the ecosystem stronger, nobody should mistake that for the attacks themselves being a good thing.
Today, I am mostly just relieved after seeing news from the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Western Australia Police Force (WAPF). Their announcement states they have arrested two men in their early 20s, who they allege are behind the TeamPCP group.
On Shai-Hulud
Before I go deeper into the news that broke today: There are absolutely no indications that TeamPCP was behind the original S1ngularity and Shai-Hulud attacks we saw in the summer of 2025. However, they did clone the worm, and it became regularly reported that they were behind the Shai-Hulud attacks. I want to make it clear that they are distinct attacks. We still don’t know who was behind the original attacks, and we may never know.
A sigh of relief
The last 6 months have been quite surreal. For me personally, it took a strange turn on March 21st, 2026, when I was investigating an attack and saw this:
You could choose to be flattered. I wasn’t. Since the beginning of my career in security, I’ve had to deal with organized crime groups, and there is nothing cute or complimentary about attracting their attention. These actors can be volatile, unpredictable, and perfectly capable of making your life miserable if they decide to fixate on you.
That is what makes these parasocial dynamics so uncomfortable. They are one-sided, unstable, and potentially dangerous. Being noticed by criminals can easily be mistaken for a kind of status or validation. In reality, it mostly means that people you would rather keep at a distance have decided to pay attention to you.
A strange threat actor
TeamPCP never fit neatly into the usual boxes. They were not really a state actor, not quite organized cybercrime, and not purely ideological either. They seemed to sit somewhere between all three, mixing money, politics, disruption, ego, and attention-seeking in ways that made them difficult to predict.
They were also not especially sophisticated. What made them dangerous was their ability to take public exploits, techniques, research, and malware ideas and operationalize them quickly. LLMs appear to have helped close the gap between seeing an attack technique and deploying it at scale. More capability, without more restraint, is probably the simplest way to describe what made TeamPCP such a problem.
Institutions matter more
As LLMs accelerate learning, experimentation, tooling, and scaling, relatively immature actors can become capable of causing serious harm much faster than before. TeamPCP showed just how much damage a very small group can cause in a remarkably short period of time. That makes the institutions around security even more important.
Technical defenses can contain an incident, but they cannot provide accountability on their own. That is why I have so much appreciation for the Australian authorities involved here. Much of this work is difficult, painstaking, and invisible from the outside, but functioning institutions are ultimately what allow us to move from simply reacting to attacks to imposing real consequences.
But institutions move slowly
The uncomfortable part is that attackers and institutions now operate on radically different timelines. A handful of people with the right tooling can go from an idea to a new campaign in hours or days, while building evidence, coordinating across borders, and reaching a durable outcome can take months or years.
LLMs are only going to make the problem worse. We are compressing the time it takes to acquire capability and turn ideas into action, while the systems responsible for responding to that harm cannot simply accelerate in the same way. Figuring out how to close that gap without sacrificing due process is going to become increasingly important.
What comes next
If there is one thing I take away from the last six months, it is that this will not be the last group like TeamPCP. The barriers are getting lower, the tooling is getting better, and small teams are gaining capabilities that would have required far more expertise and infrastructure only a few years ago.
The conditions that made TeamPCP possible are not going away. They are getting worse. The gap between how quickly attackers can gain capability and how quickly our institutions can respond is likely to widen further. The challenge is ensuring the ecosystem and the systems around it can adapt quickly enough to a world where very small, immature, and unpredictable groups can cause disproportionate damage.
For me, though, today is less about that future and more about closing a chapter. TeamPCP took a lot of sleep, a lot of weekends, and far more headspace than I would have liked. I know there will eventually be another incident, another group, and another long night.
But hopefully not this weekend.