OVHcloud CLI Backdoored on GitHub to Steal Secrets

Attackers tampered with releases of OVHcloud’s command-line tool on GitHub, swapping in a program built to steal secrets from developers’ machines, the French cloud provider’s chief executive Octave Klaba said on 19 October 2026. In a post on X, he told anyone who had downloaded the latest version that day to “update it again very quickly. Otherwise delete it” (TSN’s translation from French), via @olesovhcom on X.

The stakes are high for anyone affected. The OVHcloud CLI is used by system administrators and developers to manage cloud and hosting services from a terminal, so the machines that run it are likely to hold exactly the credentials an attacker wants. Klaba’s message to those users was blunt: “If you are affected, please change all the secrets on your disk” (TSN’s translation).

In brief

An attacker used a developer’s GitHub account to replace OVHcloud CLI releases v0.11.0 to v0.15.0 with a binary designed to “retrieve the secrets on the disk”, Klaba says.
Anyone who downloaded and ran an affected release should update or delete it and change every secret stored on that machine.
OVHcloud has not said how many people downloaded the tampered releases, and the GlassWorm link is a researchers’ “likely” attribution only.

Am I affected, and what should I do?

Klaba named the compromised versions as v0.11.0, v0.12.0, v0.13.0, v0.14.0 and v0.15.0. Version v0.10.0 and the then-upcoming v0.16.0 are clean, he said. According to BleepingComputer, threat-intelligence platform OpenSourceMalware found that source builds and Docker images were not affected.

Version or build	Status
v0.10.0	Clean
v0.11.0 to v0.15.0	Compromised
v0.16.0	Clean
Source builds, Docker images	Unaffected

Source: Octave Klaba on X, 19 October 2026; OpenSourceMalware via BleepingComputer, 20 October 2026.

The steps below come from Klaba and the researchers:

Update or remove the tool. Klaba told users who downloaded the latest CLI on 19 October to update it again quickly or delete it; v0.16.0 is the clean release he named.
Change every secret on the machine. “If you are affected, please change all the secrets on your disk,” Klaba said (TSN’s translation).
Treat the machine’s secrets as compromised. BleepingComputer, citing the researchers, says anyone who ran an affected binary “should treat all secrets on the machine as compromised”, and reports that Klaba urged affected users to clean up their systems.

OpenSourceMalware lists the affected platforms as macOS (Intel and ARM), Linux (x86_64 and ARM64) and Windows x86-64, according to BleepingComputer.

How the releases were swapped

Klaba said the compromised release appeared at 14:47 on 19 October and was detected and blocked at 16:21, after a customer reported the problem; he did not give a time zone. “The hacker used one of the developers’ GitHub accounts and added a binary whose job is to retrieve the secrets on the disk,” he wrote, adding that initial checks found no other repository affected (TSN’s translation).

His follow-up post that evening explained the weakness. GitHub’s release immutability option, which stops published releases being changed, had not been switched on, so a user with the right permissions could modify existing releases directly on GitHub without passing through OVHcloud’s build pipeline. The pipelines themselves, with their unit tests, functional tests and vulnerability checks, “were not impacted”, he said. The option has now been enabled, and Klaba declared “end of the incident” (TSN’s translation).

He also judged the malware crude but capable. “The quality of the binary is poor but it can go all the way,” he wrote (TSN’s translation).

A possible GlassWorm link

OpenSourceMalware, a community threat-intelligence platform, says the attack was likely part of a new operation by GlassWorm, a group BleepingComputer describes as active since late 2025 against the VSCode, OpenVSX, GitHub and npm ecosystems. That is the researchers’ assessment; OVHcloud has not attributed the attack.

According to BleepingComputer, the researchers found that the GitHub account used had been compromised for more than half a year and that the associated wallet is a known GlassWorm indicator. They did not analyse the payload delivered through the tampered CLI.

Our read

This is a release-integrity failure rather than a build-pipeline breach: the code was fine, but the published files could be quietly replaced by any account with write access. For security teams, the lessons are to lock releases once they are published, as OVHcloud has now done, and to limit which accounts can change them. For OVHcloud customers, the priority is simply rotating secrets on any machine that ran v0.11.0 to v0.15.0.

The open question is scale. OVHcloud has not said how many people downloaded the tampered releases, and Klaba said further details on the binary would follow.