PingCAP TiDB Cloud Breach Exposes 10.6 TB Including Customer Credentials and SQL

A massive breach of PingCAP’s TiDB Cloud service exposed the complete control plane, four years of customer connection logs, source code, and sensitive business data across 180,046 tenant organizations. The attackers extracted 10.6 TB total, including 292,276 user records, 403,262 unique emails, 115,308 API keypairs stored in plaintext, and 20,645,574 raw SQL statements capturing customer database schemas and business logic. Financial data included AWS spending of $107,195,238.42 over 57 months, HubSpot records with $552 million in nominally valued deals, and a China ledger totaling ¥353.1M. Affected customers span major companies across finance, gaming, and e-commerce including PayPay, Mercari, SoftBank, Airbnb, and Pinterest.

The breach lasted nearly two months through September 2026, with attackers setting up an automated replication pipeline that exported the control-plane database every six hours for 88 consecutive times without triggering detection. The attackers used credentials from PingCAP’s own repositories—GCP service-account keys and an Azure service principal—to establish the pipeline. PingCAP demonstrated zero visibility into the exfiltration across AWS, GCP, Atlassian, and Azure platforms despite operating a multi-tenant database service where isolation is fundamental to customer trust.

The breach exploited known vulnerabilities PingCAP’s security team had documented in 2022: any organization member could unconditionally reset cluster root passwords, and source code revealed static initialization vectors in password encryption plus role-impersonation bypasses. Engineers routinely stored customer AWS credentials in Jira tickets, and the billing engine trusted unverified user-ID headers, compounding the exposure.