On October 19, the official OVHcloud CLI utility was compromised when an attacker used a hijacked developer account to replace binaries in five already-published releases spanning v0.11.0 through v0.15.0. The malicious files were served for approximately 25 minutes between 15:47 and 16:12 Moscow time (12:47–13:12 UTC), affecting macOS, Linux x86_64/arm64, and Windows x86_64 builds while leaving rarer platforms untouched.
How the Attack Unfolded
The attacker leveraged the GitHub Releases API to overwrite existing artifacts without creating new tags or triggering GitHub Actions workflows. The final file uploaded was checksums.txt, ensuring the release page displayed matching hashes for the tampered archives. The install.sh script performed no hash verification, allowing any user running curl ... | sh or downloading directly from the release page to receive the infostealer.
The malware itself was a relatively simple infostealer designed to scan the local filesystem for secrets including OVH API keys, SSH keys, .kube/config, .npmrc, .netrc, and environment files. It was built from a dirty working copy of the repository, as evidenced by Go build metadata showing a pseudo-version and vcs.modified=true.
Why Hardcoded Hashes Provided Protection
Users who had pinned the original SHA-256 hash of ovhcloud-cli_Linux_arm64.tar.gz (5c2beb56…) in their CI pipelines detected the attack immediately when the new archive (3833daff…) caused builds to fail. The Homebrew cask in ovh/homebrew-tap also remained untouched, protecting users who installed via that channel. Those who built from source, used go install, or pulled the official Docker image were likewise unaffected.
Account Compromise Timeline
The compromised account HassenBF had been under attacker control since at least March 2025, when GlassWorm malware was deployed across multiple personal repositories using force-push amend commits. The same loader later used the Solana blockchain as a resilient C2 mechanism, reading memo fields from a specific wallet to retrieve the next-stage payload address. The account retained write access to the ovhcloud-cli repository until the October incident.
OVH has since enabled immutable releases and attestation for v0.16.0 and requested that affected users rotate all secrets discovered on compromised machines. A full post-mortem is expected in the coming days.
