PingCAP suffers massive data breach as hacker claims to have stolen 10.6 TB, affecting 180,000 users.

Recently, PingCAP, the company behind the open‑source distributed database TiDB, suffered a serious security incident. According to information posted on X by the security‑threat intelligence platform Hackmanac, a hacker group called FulcrumSec publicly claimed to have stolen about 10.6 TB of data from PingCAP, including roughly 180,000 tenant organization records, over 110,000 API keys, tens of millions of customer SQL statements, and hundreds of private code repositories.

On October 19, PingCAP posted a security incident statement on its website, confirming that its internal systems were accessed without authorization, some data was copied, and source code was also stolen. However, the scale of data disclosed by the attackers, the extent of API key leakage, and the actual impact on customers have not been verified. On October 20, PingCAP’s China team released a regional statement: to date, no production databases or business data of Chinese customers have been found to be affected, and the incident was not caused by a TiDB kernel vulnerability (details at: https://pingkai.cn/trust/security/updates/2026-10-20).

According to disclosure materials released by FulcrumSec, the attackers claim to have stolen about 4.9 million files, totaling 10.6 TB, covering PingCAP’s cloud database control plane, internal code repositories, customer support system, business systems, and cloud infrastructure‑related data.

The data listed by the attackers includes:

• 180,046 tenant organization records, 403,262 distinct email addresses;

• 115,308 customer API keys, of which 42,612 are claimed to still be active;

• Approximately 20.65 million customer SQL statements;

• About 102 million database gateway connection records;

• 413 private source code repositories;

• Numerous Jira tickets, CRM customer records, and cloud service cost data.

The attackers also claim that the leaked data includes tenant information and cloud resource configurations from several well-known companies, and they have already released an initial batch of about 200 GB of data, with more to follow.

It should be noted that the above figures come solely from the attackers’ disclosures and have not been independently verified.

PingCAP confirmed in an official statement that between September 9 and October 7, 2026, attackers used stolen service‑account credentials to access some internal systems, copying data and obtaining source code. The company discovered the incident on October 7 and began disabling the compromised credentials that same day.

FulcrumSec disclosed a more detailed attack chain. According to them, the attackers leveraged GCP service‑account keys and Azure credentials found in PingCAP’s code repository to establish a data‑replication channel to the TiDB Cloud control‑plane database.

The attacker claims that from September 8 to 30, the channel exported control‑plane data every six hours, executing a total of 88 times, without triggering any security detections during that period. If this claim is true, it means the attacker may have continuously harvested critical metadata such as tenants, users, clusters, and credentials over an extended time, rather than performing a one‑time data theft.

In addition, the attacker also released a security ticket purportedly from PingCAP’s internal Jira system, created in 2022. The ticket describes a permission issue where a low‑privilege role within the organization could reset the cluster root password. However, the authenticity of the ticket, whether the related vulnerability has been patched, and whether it is connected to this attack have not been independently verified.

In the official security statement, PingCAP confirms that the exported records contain TiDB Cloud users’ names, email addresses, organization and project association information, as well as SQL editor text and error messages. Some records also include organization, project, and cluster identifiers. Additionally, commercial information such as customer contacts, contract terms, orders, pricing, payment conditions, and billing configurations is also affected.

The leakage of API keys is one of the focal points where the parties’ statements diverge.

FulcrumSec claims to have obtained more than 110,000 plaintext API keys, of which over 40,000 are still valid. PingCAP states that the exported data tables contain encrypted TiDB Cloud API keys. An external security research firm tested a sample held by the investigators and found that it could not be used directly as an API key.

However, PingCAP also acknowledges that whether other usable credentials have been leaked requires further investigation; the claim that attackers found credentials in customer support materials has not yet been verified. PingCAP says that the external incident response team found no evidence of attackers executing commands or maintaining persistent access in the reviewed production systems. There is also no evidence that data stored in TiDB has been affected.

Nevertheless, this investigation conclusion does not deny the confirmed data breach. SQL editor logs, control‑plane metadata, and the customer support materials themselves may also contain sensitive information.

PingCAP said that as of October 14, all identified stolen credentials have been invalidated and unauthorized access paths have been blocked.

From October 12 to 13, external security agencies reported four vulnerabilities. PingCAP completed the fixes on October 14 and had them re‑tested by a third party. In addition, the company has cleaned up excessive permissions in some multi‑cloud projects, added cloud storage access logs, and plans to further strengthen credential rotation, code and key scanning, audit logs, and alerts for abnormal data exports.

Currently, PingCAP is still confirming affected customers and data types one by one, while investigating whether there was any further exploitation before the vulnerability was patched. The company says it will directly notify the relevant customers once the specific impact scope is determined.

This incident also exposes a class of potential risks in cloud database services: even if attackers do not directly access data in customers’ databases, the compromise of peripheral systems such as the cloud service control plane, SQL query history, operation logs, and support tickets can still leak a large amount of customer information and even provide clues for further attacks.

For PingCAP, the ultimate impact of the incident still depends on subsequent investigations, especially whether the API key disclosed by the attacker is actually usable, whether customers’ production credentials were leaked, and whether further attacks against downstream customers have already occurred.

As of the time of publication, there is no complete public investigation conclusion on the issue.

Reference:

PingCAP official security incident report (October 19, 2026) (https://www.pingcap.com/trust-hub/security/security-update-october-2026/)

Hackmanac posted incident information on X (https://x.com/H4ckmanac/status/2112471262710608254)

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