Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed.
The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.
40 minutes is all it takes
The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.
The LiteLLM compromise was the result of a previous supply-chain attack that infected the widely used vulnerability scanner Trivy. Other software infected in the campaign includes KICS and the Telnyx Python SDK. TeamPCP, a ramshackle but extremely capable gang largely made up of teenagers, took credit for the attack, and researchers have largely corroborated the claim.
“I’ve confirmed the data is legit by the way, multiple victim orgs,” independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont said. “It contains a significant volume of sensitive content at orgs. It’s a massive supply chain breach due to poor AI security—not because AI is the threat, but teens can run circles around orgs obsessed with rushing out AI and poor DevOps security.”
The compromised versions of all four software packages contained code that accessed the memory of infected machines, scraped its contents, and exfiltrated it through an attacker-controlled channel. The data is filled with an assortment of information. Interspersed in the wall of data are credentials to software pipelines maintained by the tens of thousands of organizations that ran LiteLLM during the 40-minute span that the supply-chain attack remained active.
In all, both security firms said some 434,000 CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) software pipelines had credentials exposed after running the compromised LiteLLM versions. In many cases, researchers at CloudSEK and Hudson Rock had trouble identifying the organizations the credentials belonged to. For instance, an email address in the dump from the domain @siriusxm.com ultimately didn’t indicate a breach at the satellite broadcaster, but rather one within the infrastructure of SiriusXM subsidiary AdsWizz.