Security researchers at FulcrumSec have publicly disclosed a significant breach of PingCAP’s TiDB Cloud, a managed distributed database platform. According to the disclosure, the attackers successfully exfiltrated approximately 10.6 TB of data, comprising nearly 5 million files. The breach reportedly included the complete TiDB Cloud control plane, billing and finance estates, source code, and a four-year history of every connection made by customers to the product, including application server IP addresses.
This image identifies the PingCAP TiDB Cloud platform mentioned in the breach report.
The researchers claim that the exfiltration was facilitated by a lack of visibility into PingCAP's cloud infrastructure. They state that they established a replication feed of the production control-plane database using credentials—specifically GCP service-account keys and an Azure service principal—that were committed in PingCAP's own repositories. This pipeline allegedly re-exported every table of the operational heart of TiDB Cloud every six hours for twenty-two days without detection. The stolen data includes 115,308 plaintext customer API keys (42,612 of which were active), 20.6 million raw SQL statements containing customer business logic, and records for 180,046 tenant organizations.
Beyond technical infrastructure, the leak reportedly exposed sensitive commercial and identity data. This includes HubSpot and Stripe records for thousands of paying tenants, NetSuite revenue ledgers, and a 'targeting map' of gateway access logs. The researchers also highlighted a critical security flaw documented by PingCAP's own team in 2022: a vulnerability where any member of a customer organization, including those with billing-only roles, could unconditionally reset the root password of all clusters in that organization. This flaw, which the researchers claim was known four years prior to the breach, potentially allowed for full account takeovers of customer clusters. Furthermore, the disclosure included evidence of internal negligence, such as support engineers pasting production credentials into Jira tickets and attaching logs containing sensitive customer information like AWS root keys and GitHub personal access tokens.
While PingCAP's official website highlights its use by major companies like Atlassian, Pinterest, and Rakuten, the FulcrumSec report specifically identifies several of these entities as being among the affected tenants. The disclosure also included a 'developer-intelligence graph' purchased by PingCAP, which linked hashed user IDs to personal emails and LinkedIn profiles of engineers at major tech firms like Tencent, Huawei, and ByteDance. The breach underscores significant risks in multi-tenant cloud environments, particularly regarding the handling of secrets in internal ticketing systems and the persistence of known security vulnerabilities in production environments.
It remains unclear how many of the exfiltrated credentials are still active or if the specific customers identified in the leak have successfully rotated their keys. The researchers have stated that more data from the 10.6 TB total exfiltration will be released in subsequent stages.
Evidence: - The breach involved the exfiltration of 10.6 TB of data, including 115,308 plaintext customer API keys and 20.6 million raw SQL statements (primary). - The attackers utilized credentials (GCP service-account keys and Azure service principals) found in PingCAP's own repositories to set up a replication feed (primary). - A 2022 internal security ticket (SECURITY-22) documented that any organization member could unconditionally reset the root password of all clusters (primary). - Support engineers were found to have pasted production credentials and sensitive logs into Jira tickets (primary). - The leak included a 'targeting map' of gateway access logs showing customer connection volumes and app-server IP addresses (primary).