PingCAP breach: TiDB Cloud users told to replace API keys now

PingCAP breach: TiDB Cloud users told to replace API keys now

23 October 2026: PingCAP, the company behind the TiDB distributed SQL database, says an attacker spent four weeks inside its internal systems, from 9 September to 7 October 2026, copying customer records and source code. It is telling every TiDB Cloud customer to replace their management API keys and rotate anything they ever shared with its support team, without waiting to hear whether they were among those affected.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on PingCAP's own incident report, customer actions page and CEO note, and on the findings of NebuSec, a firm PingCAP engaged. Pakistan's national CERT has issued an advisory, but it too works from PingCAP's disclosures, and the figure of about 50,000 people in Japan is its reading of a Japanese notice we have not read ourselves. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The company found the intrusion on 7 October and began disabling credentials the same day. By 14 October it says every compromised credential it had identified was invalid and every unauthorised access path it knew of was blocked.

A GitHub account and exposed credentials

In a note published on 23 October, co-founder and chief executive Max Liu says the attacker used "a compromised GitHub account and exposed credentials" to reach internal systems, obtain source code and copy records from internal analytics, storage and support environments. "We did not protect that information as we should have," he writes. "This happened on my watch."

PingCAP's incident report of 19 October describes the credentials as stolen service account credentials. An external incident response firm found four vulnerabilities on 12 and 13 October; PingCAP says it fixed all four by 14 October and that the firm retested each fix.

What the attacker copied

The report lists the categories of customer data found in the exported records so far, and stresses that not every customer had every category exposed:

• TiDB Cloud accounts and use: user names and email addresses, organisation and project associations, and SQL editor text and error messages, with some organisation, project and cluster identifiers.
• Business and billing: customer contacts, contract terms, orders, pricing, payment terms and billing configuration.
• Credentials: a table of TiDB Cloud API-key values, which were encrypted. One value the investigators owned could not be used directly as a key, and Liu says the encryption key was not exposed.

What PingCAP says was not reached is the data customers store in TiDB. NebuSec, one of the firms it engaged and the one that has finished its investigation, found no evidence that data in customers' databases was accessed and no attacker persistence in production. The CEO note adds a caveat that matters: the protection of encrypted API keys "does not apply to credentials that were shared in support materials".

Three actions PingCAP wants now

The customer actions page of 20 October sets out what organisations should do:

• Replace active management API keys. Organisation owners create a replacement key, move every application, script and automation to it, confirm each works, then delete the old key. A key suspected of misuse is revoked at once, even if that breaks an integration, and reported to security@pingcap.com.
• Rotate what support has seen. Credentials, keys, connection strings and logs containing secrets that were ever pasted into a support case should be treated as exposed.
• Expect targeted phishing. With contract terms, pricing and contacts in the copied data, PingCAP warns that fake requests about passwords, verification codes or payment changes may quote accurate details about the customer.

Only an organisation owner can create or delete TiDB Cloud API keys, so the rotation sits with whoever holds that role in each organisation.

A national CERT goes further

Pakistan's National Cyber Emergency Response Team (PKCERT) published an advisory on the incident with a threat update dated 21 October, rated high and aimed at government bodies, critical infrastructure, banks and any other organisation using PingCAP services. It says PingCAP's Japanese-language disclosure indicates that personal information relating to up to approximately 50,000 people in Japan may have been compromised.

The advisory widens the list of secrets to change. Beyond management API keys, it tells customers to rotate database user passwords, TLS certificates and cloud storage tokens for backups and imports, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob credentials, wherever they were saved or referenced in TiDB Cloud consoles or SQL editor history, and to review Data Service API keys separately.

It also warns about evidence. TiDB Cloud console audit logging is off by default and keeps records for 90 days, so PKCERT advises exporting every available log from 9 September onward to outside storage before it rolls over; switching logging on now cannot recover activity that was never recorded. Since the way in was stolen credentials rather than a flaw in the database engine, it adds that upgrading self-managed TiDB alone should not be treated as remediation.

What is still open

PingCAP is still working out which customers and data types were affected, checking production logs for exploitation of the four flaws before they were fixed, and assessing whether more credentials were exposed. It says it will contact affected customers directly. We list TiDB in our RDBMS software category, which holds 35 products.

Company profile on TrustList: PingCAP

Related on TrustList:

• Roundcube webmail flaw fixed in May is now being exploited
• DuckDB 1.4 support ends 17 November as 2.0 LTS ships
• PostgreSQL 19 now due on 19 November after late feature reverts

Sources

• PingCAP Trust Hub: Security Incident Report, Unauthorized Access to PingCAP Cloud Resources, 19 October 2026
• PingCAP Trust Hub: Security Update, Customer Actions, October 2026, 20 October 2026
• PingCAP: A Note from Our CEO on the PingCAP Security Incident (Max Liu), 23 October 2026
• National CERT Pakistan (PKCERT): NCA-21.211026, PingCAP Unauthorized Access and Customer Data Exposure, 21 October 2026