Threat Insight

Two young cybercriminals from Perth, Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, have been arrested after being accused of being the masterminds behind TeamPCP, a cyber extortion group that is part of the English-language cybercrime community known as Hacker Com. [1]

TeamPCP was first observed in November 2025 and has been responsible for a campaign of sophisticated cyberattacks directed at software developers using the Shai-Hulud worm, which infects code repositories on code-sharing sites such as GitHub.

Assessment

With the arrest of these two individuals, it is likely that the remaining members of the group will stop using the TeamPCP brand, at least for a while. It is also possible that the arrests could lead to information that allows law enforcement to arrest more members of the group.

Even if TeamPCP is dissolved and most of its members are eventually arrested, this does not mean that the threat posed by Shai-Hulud and similar malware to software development is over. The members of TeamPCP have already released the source code for the worm on cybercrime forums.

References

[1] https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/two-wa-men-charged-following-afp-fbi-wapf-disruption-alleged-global