OVHcloud has confirmed that an attacker swapped the published binaries of five releases of its command-line tool, OVHcloud CLI, for others designed to steal the secrets stored on the disk of whatever machine runs them. The incident happened on Monday, October 19, 2026, and affects versions v0.11.0, v0.12.0, v0.13.0, v0.14.0, and v0.15.0 downloaded from GitHub. Anyone who installed or updated the tool that day should delete it, install v0.16.0, and rotate every credential on their machine.
The OVHcloud CLI attack in 20 seconds
- Compromised versions: v0.11.0 through v0.15.0. OVHcloud says v0.10.0 and the new v0.16.0 are clean.
- The malicious files were live between 14:47 and 16:21 Central European Time.
- The attacker used a developer’s compromised GitHub account.
- If you’re affected, rotate every secret on that machine.
The warning came from OVHcloud’s own founder, Octave Klaba, on X. One detail worth clearing up: “14:47” isn’t a version number — it’s the time the tampered release appeared. OVHcloud detected and blocked it at 16:21, after a customer flagged the problem, and an initial review found no other affected repositories.
According to Klaba, the attacker used the GitHub account of one of the project’s developers and added a binary “whose job is to retrieve secrets from disk.” Klaba himself notes that “the binary’s quality is poor, but it can still get the job done.” The company is still analyzing the malicious code and has promised to publish more details.
What happened in the GitHub repository
The reconstruction by The Hacker News and researchers at OpenSourceMalware adds context. The attacker didn’t touch the source code, the tags, or the continuous-integration chain: they deleted and re-uploaded, under the same names, the download files for already-published releases, compiled on their own. They could do this because the repository didn’t have GitHub’s release immutability enabled, a setting that prevents a release from being modified after publication. Klaba has acknowledged that setting was off, and OVHcloud has now turned it on.
In release v0.15.0, the packages for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Linux (x86_64 and ARM64), and Windows x86_64 were replaced, along with the checksums.txt file, which was altered so the published checksums would match the malicious binaries. It was precisely a customer’s continuous-integration process, which had the original hash pinned, that caught the change and opened a public issue. How the developer’s credentials were stolen hasn’t been explained. OpenSourceMalware links that account to the GlassWorm campaign, though it presents that as its own inference, not a confirmed fact.
Who’s affected, and what to do
The risk is concentrated among those who manually or via script downloaded one of those binaries from GitHub during the attack window, or who updated the tool with their own update command during that time. According to The Hacker News, users who installed it with Homebrew, which had the original hashes pinned, or who built it from source or used the Docker image, weren’t exposed. OVHcloud hasn’t said how many copies were downloaded.
The tool stores OVHcloud API credentials in the ~/.ovh.conf file and also reads them from environment variables, so those are the first things to change. But OVHcloud’s recommendation goes further: rotate every secret on the disk, including SSH keys, tokens for other cloud providers, Git credentials, and passwords saved in configuration files. The recommended steps are:
- Delete the affected binary and install v0.16.0, published as an immutable release.
- Rotate credentials from a different machine, not the one that ran the binary.
- Revoke and regenerate OVHcloud API keys, along with the rest of the machine’s secrets.
- Verify downloads before using them, and pin hashes in scripts and continuous-integration pipelines.
To check that a downloaded file matches the official release, GitHub’s command-line tool can verify it:
gh release verify-asset v0.16.0 FILE_NAME --repo ovh/ovhcloud-cliThe case comes just days after some copies of Rank Math SEO PRO 3.0.123 were distributed with malware, another attack that arrived through the official download channel. There was nothing exotic about OVHcloud’s case: a compromised account with write access and an unenabled GitHub protection were enough. This time the hit landed on a tool built specifically to manage cloud servers and credentials.
Frequently asked questions
Which versions of OVHcloud CLI are compromised?
v0.11.0, v0.12.0, v0.13.0, v0.14.0, and v0.15.0 downloaded from GitHub on October 19, 2026. According to OVHcloud, v0.10.0 and v0.16.0 are clean.
Does OVHcloud CLI version 14.47 exist?
No. 14:47 is the time the tampered release appeared, not a version number. OVHcloud blocked it at 16:21.
Am I affected if I installed OVHcloud CLI via Homebrew or Docker?
According to The Hacker News, no: Homebrew had the original hashes pinned, and the Docker image wasn’t modified. Builds from source code weren’t affected either.
What should I do if I ran an affected version?
Delete the binary, install v0.16.0, and rotate from a different machine every secret that was on that one, starting with your OVHcloud API credentials.
Sources:
