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LiteLLM Says Stolen GitHub CLI Tokens and a Lookalike Repository Were Used to Publish Malicious 1.107.0 Releases to PyPI and Docker

LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI and Docker carried a credential stealer and backdoor; the project says attackers used stolen GitHub CLI tokens and a lookalike repository to publish it.

Cybersecurity Malware
litellm pypi supply-chain github-actions credential-stealer
Verified pipeline
Sources: 4 Publisher: signed Contributor: signed Hash: 3b53c02560 View

Overview

LiteLLM, the Python package and proxy for calling large language model providers, published a malicious version 1.107.0 to PyPI and to container registries on October 21, 2026, according to The Hacker News. The project’s director of security, Oliver Jensen, said the malicious actions were taken through three engineers’ GitHub accounts, “appearing to be by way of stolen GitHub CLI OAuth tokens,” as The Hacker News reported. This is the second time LiteLLM has been compromised this year, after the TeamPCP incident in March that The Machine Herald previously reported.

What Happened

According to The Hacker News, the incident took place around 4:00 a.m. PST on October 21. The compromised artifacts were LiteLLM v1.107.0 on PyPI, plus the tags v1.107.0, latest, main-latest and main-stable on both Docker Hub and the GitHub Container Registry. The report says users who downloaded an unpinned version via pip between 11:39 a.m. and 1:23 p.m. UTC, or who used the affected Docker tags between 11:46 a.m. and 2:20 p.m. UTC, were impacted.

JFrog found that all seven PyPI wheels for 1.107.0 contain the payload, across macOS, Linux, musl Linux and Windows targets. The source tarball lacks the three payload files, JFrog said, but its pyproject.toml contains an added data = "cook" setting that is absent from the corresponding Git tag. JFrog researcher Guy Korolevski drew a lesson from the difference: “Source review can show that the main litellm code is legitimate while still missing executable files added to a built artifact.”

How the Release Pipeline Was Bypassed

LiteLLM said in an advisory, as summarized by The Hacker News, that it had hardened its release pipeline after the March incident by moving releases to a private repository, making Docker release tags immutable and signing Docker images. The report lists this sequence:

  • On October 19, 2026, LiteLLM temporarily expanded release permissions for two internal engineers.
  • The attacker had access to three sets of developer GitHub CLI credentials, including one that could run GitHub workflows.
  • The attacker used a token belonging to one of the project’s GitHub organization owners to disable branch protections and force-push the malicious changes.
  • The attacker ran the compromised workflow, pointing it to a lookalike repository, “Berri-AI/litellm” instead of “BerriAI/litellm,” which caused the poisoned artifacts to be signed and published.

Wiz wrote that the lookalike repository was a hyphenated variant of the legitimate BerriAI organization and that, between 08:56 and 10:46 UTC on October 21, the attacker pushed 10 commits to it.

The Suspected Token Source

Jensen said in an early statement that LiteLLM had not yet identified the mechanism by which the attacker acquired the tokens, per The Hacker News. A later LiteLLM statement, quoted by Wiz, reads: “After a thorough investigation, we have observed specific situations in which Claude Code will embed a user’s GitHub CLI OAuth token into a response body, and in situations where response bodies are logged, these tokens may appear in LiteLLM logs.” The project also identified “an unexpected, innocuously named user account” in an internal LiteLLM deployment that was exposed to the public internet, and said it believes the attacker obtained the tokens from that deployment’s logs. LiteLLM said it has not confirmed how the attacker gained access to the deployment and suspects a recently patched vulnerability, per Wiz and The Hacker News.

What the Malware Does

Wiz reported that installing the package places three files, cook.pth, cook.py and sitecustomize.py, in the site-packages root, where they run whenever a Python interpreter starts. JFrog said cook.pth contains only “import cook,” so the payload can run even when an application never imports litellm.

The credential stealer, which calls itself privcollect, uses 16 modules aimed at browsers, cloud providers and AI services, according to Wiz. It targets browser credentials, AWS, GCP and Azure credentials, API keys for LLM providers, and SSH and GPG keys. Wiz said the stolen data is encrypted and sent to www.litellm[.]dev/healthcheck, a domain it described as attacker controlled and impersonating LiteLLM infrastructure.

The second component, sitecustomize.py, runs only on Linux and macOS. As The Hacker News described it, the script fetches a domain from a GitHub dead drop and, if it receives a valid response, downloads and runs a second-stage Python script. Wiz said the dead-drop file was never populated beyond initial test values and that GitHub took the repository down as of 1:30 p.m. UTC. Wiz also wrote that the dual-technique approach, using both .pth files and sitecustomize.py, “appears to be the first documented case in the wild.”

Observed Abuse

Wiz said it observed abuse of stolen credentials starting approximately 4.5 hours after exfiltration. Between 16:20 and 17:01 UTC, the attacker validated AWS instance role credentials harvested from compromised CI runners and Kubernetes nodes. Wiz wrote that each credential was checked with sts:GetCallerIdentity, followed by bedrock:ListFoundationModels and a ListModels call, “consistent with LLMjacking.”

Attribution and Guidance

The use of a .pth file mirrors the March attack attributed to TeamPCP, but Socket told The Hacker News that “The public evidence reviewed so far doesn’t establish a connection to the March attack,” according to The Hacker News. JFrog likewise wrote that no evidence currently links the incident to TeamPCP.

Users who installed the malicious version are advised to revoke and replace exposed credentials from a clean environment and pin version 1.106.2 by digest, per The Hacker News.

What We Don’t Know

  • How the attacker obtained the GitHub CLI tokens; LiteLLM’s explanation is described as a suspicion, not a confirmed finding.
  • How the internal deployment became publicly accessible, according to The Hacker News.
  • Whether the operator is connected to the March compromise; Socket said it has no evidence for that attribution.