It's 5:20 AM here in Europe and I just rotated a bunch of keys.
Only to read,
> Because deployments are paused, you will not be able to redeploy your services to pick up the new credentials until builds are restored. We will post here when builds resume with any additional details.
So now my service does not work. Which is worse: a stolen key or a broken product? I'm genuinely regretting following their advice on rotating keys, because logs showed no sign of incorrect usage, and our service would at least have remained online.
I hope that they automatically redeploy their customer services. I just worry that I won't have tested it. I mean: 5AM. Keys changed. Nothing more I can do. Should go back to sleep. No timeline to wake up to check deployments, so... I... wait?
Spend limits saved me. I noticed a massive spike on one of my Anthropic keys and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It hit the cap in one day, which isn't normal. So I rotated it just to be safe. I went to update it in Railway only to find out that I couldn't do deploys, so I also have a broken product. The good news is that it's only serving around 300 users, but still. Not great.
Same situation. Frankly unbelievable - how do you not lead with this? You can't tell customers to rotate their keys and not inform them in the same breath them that actually, environment variable updates currently cannot deploy.
They're actively firefighting an incident, and are likely going to make some mistakes along the way. In this case, they've erred on the side of security over availability, which in some cases is the better outcome. I know not in all, but some.
> What you should do: As such, we strongly recommend that you immediately roll all environment variables, including any API keys, stored in Railway, as well as any private registry credentials, and review logs for those services for unusual activity.
> All deployments are paused while we investigate. Until builds are restored, you will not be able to roll out new versions. We apologize for this inconvenience.
They lead with rotating keys.
Next, I did not realize that this meant not being able to restart an existing deployment to bring up new env vars. They also speak of builds. I don’t need a new build. I need my existing deployment to work.
It was not at all clear ‘paused’ mean this; maybe I should have realized, but I had interpreted it as doing new deployments or builds. New services. Code changes. New builds as they even say. It’s fully reasonable to pause that in this sort of situation and so I had interpreted their statement that way.
If there is a clear impact from following advice — ‘do what we recommend and your service will not function’ — those who provide that advice need to make that clear.
Their first message where they recommended rotating keys did not make that clear (though obviously if you cannot deploy, rotating keys means you will go down)
”An external incident response firm reviewed PingCAP’s production systems and found no evidence that the attacker ran commands or maintained persistent access in the systems reviewed”
The evidence is in the blog post explaining how they did it. However seeing at how bad their operations were I doubt they have evidence of anything themselves
> We even stood up a replication feed of their own control-plane database using credentials committed in their own repositories — GCP service-account keys and an Azure service principal — and let their infrastructure deliver it to us. Every six hours, for the last twenty-two days of the campaign, from 8 September to 30 September, that pipeline faithfully re-exported every table of the operational heart of TiDB Cloud — tenants, users, API keys, cluster credentials, changefeeds, migrations — and pushed it out. Eighty-eight consecutive exports, not one detection event.
You may think that sounds like a very nice salary but $4MM annual gross is a very small business. I can’t imagine how Railway would be in business if that were considered a large customer.
Sure, I guess there are a ton of dumb people. But please name a few sites that aren't slop ecom fly by nights... I cant think of any serious business that runs on raleway.
I dont understand using any PaaS that essentially functions by arbitraging aws to people that are scared of an aws dashboard at a 3x markup.
Seems like a decent platform for toy projects not for enterprise.
Maybe I'm finally old, but I don't see how it's surprising that Raleway is at all successful. Heroku built the same business ~15 years ago and had plenty of "enterprise" clients. I don't really understand if there's that much more value in Raleway vs Vercel, and Vercel claims to have OpenAI and Meta as clients.
Never underestimate the power of good UX and tooling. I’m not really familiar with Railway, but Heroku (and Vercel) made their business around ease of use and good DX and tools. It’s sadly not a great long term business strategy because there a price point where it’s cheaper to pay someone to deal with AWS or Azure for you.
300K ARR means you get 300K in annual recurring revenue.
Subtract costs for employees. Which, given current economy and inflation, that gets you a founder scraping on their savings, one or two other people (remember that if you're paying someone unless it's totally offshored through a house which has it's own inflation, you have other factors) and then your own taxes... yeah... much more than that and you are in the black.
As a general factor I keep in mind, when I worked at a 'normal' but toxic place before I was an actual software engineer, my manager's rules were something like '40 percent L2R' (might have been lower) for in-house employees and 70-
80% L2R for contractors.
IOW, for every dollar billed for an actual employee, we paid the employee 40 cents. For every dollar billed for a contractor, we paid them 70-80 cents.
I've heard similar figures from others (e.x. 'in house employee has a real cost of 1.5-2x their actual pay').
And yes it sucks and yes the structure at least here in the US is a factor.
Yup, got my OpenRouter key. They managed to run up a whole $2 on Opus 5.5 and Fable. Well, time for a new hosting provider I guess...
Incidentally, I'm testing Muse as an email triage agent today - it buried "oh also, railway and anthropic say yours keys have been leaked and you need to rotate asap" under 50 routine deploy / admin emails notifications. Oh to live through such an AI powered software renaissance!
Right just as I take my first day off (for the entire year!) from work to fly out for a vacation. The mother of all security bombs starts dropping all around stacks and services that I am responsible for. How else could have taken time off go for me…
Brother do not cancel anything for these people, they do not care about you, it's their fault for not considering bus factor in their org chart. Why can't the person above you handle that?
Thanks, yes I will. Left without the laptop(s). Let the chips fall where they lay. If they need me back so urgently, they will have to go through the full cancellation of booked flights and hotels first. Lets enjoy the time off.
I didn't read it as that, more as, "You might hear about other similar work-related bullshit here while you're trying to chill and not think about it".
Oh you're right, that does sound like a good reason for the original commenter to not take his vacation. Lucky the organisation he works for made him the single point of failure in circumstances such as these.
Seen multiple folks in the Railway Discord confirming that their secrets stored in Railway have been used by third parties, so it definitely sounds like the attackers were able to read decrypted environment variables.
> Use environment variables to point to where secrets are located, not to store their values.
Now your apps need to be able to read the secret that is pointed to, as opposed to the task runner populating the secret and the app would not know about the details.Not to mention the changes it entails to development.
It doesn't sound like they got them via a shell environment, they just hacked into the place that stored them. If the place you store secrets can be hacked into, it doesn't really matter if they are injected into environment variables or not.
Environment variables are generally fine for secrets. Environment files are problematic. Modern systems that inject secrets into the environment launch the program itself.
(pre-caveat thing to not be massively annoyingly pedantic throughout, I'm not a security buff and I know who it is I'm talking to, I'm not trying to correct them)
I'm not sure I get the difference - the issue I would have thought was having the system code have access to the secrets themselves? Env file vs env vars injected at runtime seems the same there - either can be exfiltrated. The difference would be having it injected when used.
Is the problem with files about what happens outside that, being committed, etc?
Everything can be exfiltrated. If you never store the environment in a durable file, it's not meaningfully easier to exfiltrate from the environment than from process memory. Most of the wisdom about the insecurity of environment variables falls out of people setting them in .profile or in .envrc files --- that's very bad, yes, as are configuration files (the thing 12 Factor Apps was responding to).
The headline here is that there's no reason to believe "environment variables" were the reason this data was breached; presumably, the database those variables came from was what actually got hit.
You can say "everything can be exfiltrated" but capturing my PC's password is about nigh unto impossible. The only way it can be captured is if a program has active control over the keyboard controller/associated drivers when I type in the password to unlock it.
The security team at my company is working with a frontier lab to scan all our code/systems. They are in a borderline panic to close every possible issue, even innocuous ones that are buried under defense in depth. Whatever they are seeing from our partner has them spooked -- as in "acceptable risk" is no longer a thing anymore.
I fully believe the only sustainable future is that hot patching will need to itself become fully automated. Hot patch now with a minimal allowed amount of line changes to head off the AIs, review it in office hours for auditing and the team is actually awake.
My second belief is that environment variables as a development concept will need to be retired. If it's something that causes a security breach if it by its mere existence on a public git repo, it is information that by design cannot ever pass to a filesystem out of a chain of trust, not by mere development conventions people choose to adhere to.
Due to the small nature of hot patching (eg. bump this dependency, rotate these keys, turn off that config, follow the runbook) it will unlikely need to be a frontier model and is likely able to be done LocalLLM/Jev style decision making rather than having to hand all the keys to frontier model operators.
For the record, there was a bunch of non-functional vibe coded fixes flying around during this PHP bug. If you were just running the first thing AI made because you were worried about "not reacting," you would likely end up running a crap script.
AI is quite good at finding vulnerabilities, but it's been rough for patching them. The old adage "defenders have to be right every time, attackers only have to be right once" applies to AI security patches.
Great, but the fact remains that easy hot patching which skips normal review is going to open you up to many of the same liabilities you're trying to minimize by introducing it. The target just shifts, and people will attack that infrastructure.
The actual solution largely involves the same technologies but in reverse: leveraging AI for live security monitoring, better correctness validation and security testing before code goes live, etc. And of course more pressure to use battle-tested widely-adopted libraries and systems, even though of course that comes with its own tradeoffs.
Importantly, as an engineer, when someone tells you something has liabilities or tradeoffs, the response is not "Everything is a liability, existing is a liability"; that is unprofessional. The appropriate response is to engage with them on these tradeoffs and working through the best ones, because that's your job. Otherwise defer to security engineers who are ready to back up their arguments. It could be as simple as following up with, "But do you think those liabilities outweigh the benefits of hot patching without proper review? What are some of the main liabilities you see, and what methods/technologies do you think properly address them?"
With AI, in the long term open source code might actually become more secure than obfuscated closed source, since it's had so many more (AI) eyes looking at it.
>We are going back to static htmls for public pages...
God yes, please. I backpack and mountaineer in the PNW and have been trying to research trip ideas up in British Columbia, and as a result I discovered https://bivouac.com.
Here's a website that's still frequently used by a large number of people as a valuable resource, is regularly updated and maintained, and yet looks like it's straight out of 1995.
Every pages loads instantaneously, everything is simple yet packed with detail, and it's such a basic, straightforward, delightfully pleasant experience to just browse through the site. I was so thrilled after just 5 minutes on the site that I threw them $25 for a year's full access.
Sorry for the tangent, but oh man, it's such a refreshingly stark contrast to the rest of the bullshit that fills the web these days.
That was always going to happen. The future of the internet is AIs scamming you and your grandmother, ransomwaring you, draining your back accounts, etc. There will be no reason or rhyme, it's simply a function of available compute and ease of automation, both of which have reached a critical threshold.
I think we'll see a reduction in complexity and an increase in transparency, rather than just on-prem.
One medium-sized server can now easily serve the entire banking system of a large country. So you don't need clusters of servers with careful tradeoffs between consistency and availability because of the CAP theorem.
Just get a big honking host, slap Postres on it, and run your application server in a VM on the same host. For backup, export the WAL logs from Postgres onto your favorite off-site blob storage. UI for it? There's Pigsty.
It still makes sense to host this in a cloud provider, just because you probably don't want to deal with actual hardware. And maybe get a second standby server for redundancy.
That's it.
You'll need a bunch of external dependencies for email, 2FA, observability, LLMs, and so on. But they should all be outgoing dependencies that should not allow access back into your system.
A PostgreSQL server on an NVMe can handle several _million_ simple requests per second. This is bonkers.
Do you think you can hit these load levels? For compute, a 64-core CPU can saturate a 10G network with simple template rendering. If the code is written in something reasonably fast (Go, Rust, Java).
Of course, if you're on a scale of Amazon or Stripe, you'll need more than that.
Sometimes I do miss owning the hardware to run a thing.
What I don't miss was having all of those appliances run a different base distro of Linux, each with varying levels of update support, while the security team keeps reading security scans to me.
Train wreck. People were writing on discord 3 hours ago, 10 hours after the incident started, that keys created just for railway were running up usage. Meanwhile builds have been down for more than 12 hours. Only NOW did they just send out an email to all customers. I wouldn't have found out until then if I wasn't checking the discord periodically.
We have gotten a lot of comments about why didn't we just message the breach sooner when people have noticed compromise with their accounts. I think that crit is fair and justified, and although we have been up for days on end- I don't blame you if you don't have sympathy for us.
Our thought process was that we didn't want to recommend that people roll keys when we couldn't possibly confirm that we confidently plugged the breach and rolled the mitigation(s). I am comfortable to publicly say that this was a highly motivated attacker. Meanwhile, our threat team mitigates DDoSes, CVEs, while been patching everything immediately as dealt with exploits.
As for this breach in particular, we tried to balance a duty to warn, which we take very seriously... However, it took a significant amount of time on the order of hours to verify, reviewing, and keep up with the attacker as they attempted to move laterally around, and briefly, within the system. We didn't want message anything beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were no further exploit paths.
We take the view that we would like to "aviate, navigate, then communicate" when we deal with incidents like these then we prepared communications to the public and all users. While it was ongoing, we were in contact with external partners and vendors to revoke keys (the source of some online chatter) with investigators that required time and coordination.
On the incident side of the house, it's a suite of bad options, we're still in the middle of it making sure customers are safe. But, hopefully this offers a view into our thought process.
Formal postmortem after we fully restore service and complete the investigation. Apologies to all, I personally I feel like I let everyone down.
> and although we have been up for days on end- I don't blame you if you don't have sympathy for us.
From my timezone, this started last night and is ongoing into today. Has this been going for longer than the status page and email indicated? If so, why was notification delayed so long?
I love your product, have an incredible amount of sympathy for you as humans (having been in similar sleep-consuming nightmares) and was willing to forgive the GCP-triggered outage as an understandable teething pain, but sadly this response has really knocked my confidence.
I understand the hard reality of security issues -- "urgently rotate your keys, they're already compromised" is an important message to share -- but "sorry, that will also require your site going down because we've blocked deploys" (presumably as a response to the incident...) is an incredibly frustrating situation to find ourselves in.
I also want to briefly note that communicating, from the outset, "this is a significant incident, your keys are compromised, the attack is ongoing and you cannot enter new keys as _those too will be compromised_" is a better response than leaving people to figure out the unfortunate combo endpoint of "my keys are compromised, I have rotated them, this has broken my site but I have new keys, and oh surprise, I can't deploy". The full story needed to be communicated more clearly; the email just said "revoke your keys", which I urgently did... and then remembered/found out that changing environment variables requires a deploy.
I would rather have known earlier that I should put a notice on my site, or my own social media, or notify my own customers ASAP and disable some functionality (or make my own choice about porting somewhere else as a mitigation) than get caught out like this after the horse has bolted and it turns out you've been desperately trying to get it back into the paddock for days.
"aviate, navigate, then communicate" only matters if you are the one in control of outcomes.
Customers could have simply revoked keys and not re-launched services with rolled credentials (that from your post, may have been re-stolen), but instead you let this fester.
What a disaster for Railway. I hope you get through this stressful moment, but this should be the end of Railway.
I was a loyal railway customer for a while, but this response smacks of "we didn't want people to know" instead of "we wanted to take responsibility."
The options railway has given us are "rotate your keys and bring down your service" or "keep your service up and let the exposed keys remain at risk." Kind of a crap position, no? Mistakes are going to happen, but when the suggested mitigations are to stab yourself in the leg or stab yourself in the ass, it's hard to be sympathetic.
I have to imagine quite a few users are asking their agents to port their stacks over to alternate providers like I am. The cost of switching has never been cheaper thanks to AI.
Railway / OpenAI: I had a key compromised this morning. It hit our limit, so I revoked the key... and figured, well, we'll have to track down the leak.
Then this security notice came out, telling all of their customers to rotate all their keys... As the guy whose spent the entire evening rotating keys and etc. doing
this is... it's a huge message to send.
The cost and implications go really far.
We have many production services that we've taken offline or disabled because we can't deploy to fix the credentials. because of the railway deploy problem...
Railway was stuck between some pretty nasty tradeoffs. I get that the few hour delay in communication caused some of us more cost, issues, and potential breach... and maybe larger suff.
But I also realize that rolling the keys while things may still be compromised, with deployments blocked, could make thins even more sticky
leaves only very bad options. Also we don't know how much they we're spending time actively stopping the attack. the time and focus could be very much consumed. if it was 5% of exposure and they prevented the 95% exposure.. i'm sure glad they aviated instead of communicated.
We make the best decision we can in these moments.. and they all just suck.
IMO "aviate, navigate, then communicate" does not work in this situation. There is more than one pilot. The moment you detected a breach, hell, even knowing that an attacker was inside your system, you should have pointed to anyone. Hell, even AI, to draft a disclosure with more info coming.
I had an Anthropic API key that was used in a Railway deployment be disabled due to evidence of unauthorized abuse ~3hrs after receiving the Railway security notice. They managed to spend about $20 in Opus 4.8 tokens before the abuse was detected. What a headache.
After the last outage we considered moving off to Cloud Run - used it several times before and it is rock solid - but we gave them another chance. Unlikely we are staying after a day of no deployments and then this.
Rotated all our secrets but since deploys are paused our app is down.
I really don't know how we are going to deal with accelerated exploit generation via LLMs — it blows up the disclosure processes we've evolved.
The only thing I can think of is hunkering down with static HTML to reduce attack surface, but that's laughably incompatible with many many business requirements.
In new software I write these days I limit the number of external dependencies and mostly vibe code anything I need besides the most critical foundational libraries (increasingly I am replacing these as well).
I think this, the supply chain attacks and binary reverse engineering will cause us to go back to thin clients, html over the wire and vibe coded libs instead of external open source deps.
Vibe coding deps is security through obscurity, with all of its weaknesses (and strengths). It's not that such deps have fewer security bugs than the open source reference implementations from which they are derived, it's just that those bugs are currently less discoverable.
In the near to medium term, the current open source regime has issues because bugs have become extremely discoverable and easy to exploit. But I am skeptical that obscurity will provide vibe coded deps sufficient protection over the long term. As soon as the source code for those vibe-coded deps leaks, you are screwed.
It's not just obscurity, it's increasingly difficult to trust the governance and quality of code of any outside library. A lot of deps in code are unnecessary you use maybe 1-10% of the api surface. But since building and maintaining software can be cheaper now it can be better to maintain a 1-5k LOC vibe coded version that meets your security bar than to trust an external party's governance & quality. This has the additional benefit of reconsidering if you even need the dep or if you can reuse something you already have (since you may not want to maintain the lib).
I really doubt that. If these models continue to improve, they will be producing higher quality code than, maybe not the best human developers, but certainly the average human developer who would have typically been writing code on these systems.
Pre-2024 code is full of human-written vulnerabilities.
Limiting the number of dependencies is always good, within reason. Especially with eco-systems that want to pull in everything and the kitchen sink. That's just asking for a supply chain attack. I try to limit myself to what well reputed distros provide and what I can review. That's still no guarantee but it cuts down the risk substantially.
I think it will kill open source to some degree. I found it already very hard to imagine how the endless queues of issues were being dealt with so diligently, but at least there was a human on the other side. The torrent that is unleashed now is not manageable on a human scale. It's a highly automated arms race with a bunch of good-willing humans caught in the crossfire between large companies and criminals duking it out.
A lot of people in the open source world actually enjoy the act of programming. Not all of them will enjoy prompting to the same degree, but to keep pace with the bad guys you will have to either join or find something else to do. That's going to be a big loss.
It's funny, that's true although I personally can't relate — I enjoy having built something robust, but the act of building isn't something I love.
I can imagine prompting an LLM to build provably correct software. Aren't we already doing something similar already when we remind it to write unit tests and account for all edge cases?
Actually writing provably correct software from scratch sounds terribly tedious, which is why I've never explored it. But maybe an LLM could make that task more approachable.
I switch between the two modes. I love algorithmic stuff and I really don't like working on boilerplate and plumbing. So I use AI for the second and read every line and all the other stuff I roll by hand. The speedup isn't super like that but the amount of control is pretty good.
I just gave this prompt to duck.ai (5.6 Terra under the hood): "How would one go about writing a provably correct algorithm to count UTF-8 code points?"
It gave me something which looked pretty legit. Of course, the generated output very likely to be subtly wrong, but as starting input to a formal checked specification/proof process it seemed like a good start.
I wrote some UTF-8 based string handling software back in the day. It doesn't seem unreasonable to write up a set of requirements and edge cases and then have a formal mechanism prove correctness for common UTF-8 string manipulation operations.
[PEAK HN ON] Now if we could just write provably correct exception handling, we could solve one of the two PHP vulns from today. [PEAK HN OFF]
UTF8 is one nasty little standard. So many edge cases.
I should check it against my email address validator that would be a nice benchmark. It's interesting that there are people that are using email addresses that are not actually valid according to the standard.
We can have an LLM enumerate all those edge cases, and we can assemble them into a spec. Then we can integrate that spec into a proof.
And because the spec is functional rather than expressive, we can produce copyright-free, provably correct reference implementations whose correctness is as strong as our spec and our proof process.
This reference implementation would then be available for use by a language like PHP, or perhaps an LLM generating a vibe-coded dependency.
Over time, then, the accumulation of such proven reference works grows. We'll never prove all the application code out there correct, but incremental progress is possible.
I think such constructs should be part of the language or at least of the standard runtime library and not re-implemented by every Tom, Dick, Harriet & HAL.
Prompting the LLM to "look for vulnerabilities in PHP's multipart upload handling code" is going to find stuff that "look for vulnerabilities in PHP" won't.
I was more talking about staying up on security issues with your stack after they are patched. We will need to check for security updates constantly, or risk being exploited in the gap between a security release and you finding out that you need to update your software.
Yes, so who will pay for that? Open source so far meant you would use your brains and your creativity, now you need to use your money too if you want to keep pace. From a 'guts, credits & glory' proposition to 'slop processor if you can afford it' is not really an upgrade.
I'm already tired, between pushing back on vibe coded internal projects being put onto the internet and then the constant barrage of CVEs that mean nothing.
Then you have real security incidents that you need to tune into constantly.
What about buckets? I tried to regenerate my secrets but deploys are paused. I don't know if they actually rotated or not because the old keys seem to still be working! Dear attackers, please don't read or mutate my files while my app is offline :)
I changed he api key in the env var as openrouter revoke the previous one based on this incident. However, as the redeploy cannot be done in my region, the env cannot be updated and now the product cannot be used. Any command in railway to fix this?
how are the secrets decrypted, I would like some explanation so that I can have some understanding here, I am starting to feel like all these companies are just meme-ing with their security posture.
Like did someone vibe code too hard, how do env secrets leak for everyone...
They absolutely are. Every ceo sees security as a massive money pit (it is) but there’s a reason it’s expensive and hard to do well. Those compliance frameworks they show off are meaningless and can be manipulated extremely easily. There are a lot of security leaders who are going to be having a very bad time soon.
It’s funny that every security breach disclosure now has a mandatory “the attacker used AI!” as if it absolves you from having to maintain a secure system. If anything it makes the situation more damning. If it was possible to find exploits using AI then your own red teaming should have found them before the attacker did.
Defending is so much harder than attacking. You don't even have to focus on one target, as you can just mass-AI-script a lot of attacks wherever it's possible, and see what sticks. Even if you did everything right, there's always the social-engineering angle, or a single compromised device, or just accidental bad upgrade through supply chain. If you can mass-spread the seed, and plant something that "calls home" constantly, you can just have an agent that would start the attack the minute it gets infected, and go deeper.
It's really a wild west right now, have no idea how we fix it. I'm assuming everything will get more concentrated in big co's hands, as having a very robust security is extremely hard.
Also, we have to agree that younger people will start companies. There will be small companies that cannot afford red teams. There will be companies that are just not equipped, and their profit margins cannot sustain constant attacks.
> It’s funny that every security breach disclosure now has a mandatory “the attacker used AI!”
This isn't in the article? They do not at all claim "the attacked used AI!".
The only mention of "AI" is "We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers." This is the same (apparently) end-goal as the Opencode breach last week, and is not blaming or finger-point at AI. It is stating (rightfully) that AI inference is very easy to resell and turn stolen credentials into cash.
> your own red teaming should have found them before the attacker did
Easier said than done. The defender has to do everything right, all the time, to prevent a headline like this. The attacker only needs to be right once, and it's game over. AI or no AI.
It's a nice saying, but if you did enough things right, the attacker still needs multiple things to line up in order to get anything of value, if you get everything right. No one competent who's doing everything right is leaving open S3 buckets open to the world. Doing some things right means using multiple buckets, using multiple time limited-keys with limited read-only access, using special write-access, not having admin keys on developer laptops, a SIEM system that monitors buckets for traffic going in & out and sending emails (both amount and who it's going to) to the person on call. A firewall (inc IP-address-based blocks so eg China can't access the customer data from China at all). A WAF.
That's not an exaustive list but if the attacker gets one of those "right" once, it is not game over. (They aren't of equal strength, mind you.)
I didn’t actually see that in this post at all. They mention that the end goal of the attackers might be to get to AI inference providers. But I don’t think they are crying “AI was used” here.
We (Railway) make no claims about the tools the attacker used in the above post.
However, from discussions with partners, it resembled the pattern of attacks to secure AI API tokens and credentials. Preliminary forensics tell us that this was the primary goal of their attack. That said, I want to be careful here commenting until we have our formal public post-mortem.
This is so fucked up. I was reviewing my account and I just saw this in the logs... Claude says database credentials and bucket credentials go in via env vars so likely they had access to database and bucket contents.
Audit Logs
Oct 21, 2026 05:54:13 PM CDT
BucketInstanceCredential.regenerated in my-project production by Railway Staff
Oct 21, 2026 05:54:13 PM CDT
BucketInstanceCredential.regenerated in my-project production by Railway Staff
Oct 21, 2026 05:54:13 PM CDT
BucketInstanceCredential.regenerated in my-project production by Railway Staff
So far I found they accessed my S3 buckets, used my OpenAI key (which OpenAI thankfully detected odd behaviour and revoked the key automatically), did readonly operations on my Valkey instance, etc.
> We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers.
So basically, the same shit as in the crypto heydays - rich techbros providing extremely lucrative incentives for unscrupulous actors to hack anyone and anything.
Of course, it was a giant scam that tested for nothing and optimized for how to pass a test.
Let's see if companies are ready to hire more people who know what they are doing, against a super-intelligent swarm of millions of agents with cyber capabilities.
Well this is certainly interesting, I wonder how their secrets were being stored, I assumed they were stored in vault and then injected with a sidecar, but I guess not
This is exactly why we should own our deployment stacks. Going to push up the launch here as pdt is a railway alternative thttps://github.com/autoidm/pdt for scheduled jobs
AI makes this so much easier to do now, we should all own our own code, and deployment infrastructure (use a cloud instead of someone wrapping aws for you)
No, and this isn't about a supply chain attack on Python libs. This is about running your service(s) on a service that runs in front of a cloud provider. My argument is simply that it's needless extra risk
You do have an argument to be made about vendoring our dependencies, or removing them in general. Not a bad idea
It's 5:20 AM here in Europe and I just rotated a bunch of keys.
Only to read,
> Because deployments are paused, you will not be able to redeploy your services to pick up the new credentials until builds are restored. We will post here when builds resume with any additional details.
So now my service does not work. Which is worse: a stolen key or a broken product? I'm genuinely regretting following their advice on rotating keys, because logs showed no sign of incorrect usage, and our service would at least have remained online.
I hope that they automatically redeploy their customer services. I just worry that I won't have tested it. I mean: 5AM. Keys changed. Nothing more I can do. Should go back to sleep. No timeline to wake up to check deployments, so... I... wait?
I don’t know if this is a real question, but for most credentials a stolen key is worse than downtime on a product.
No, a leaked credential is a nothing event in a mass leak as far as expected loss goes.
You’re better off waiting and monitoring until you’re sure you can get back online if your service supports any kind of revenue.
What are you talking about.
Spend limits saved me. I noticed a massive spike on one of my Anthropic keys and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It hit the cap in one day, which isn't normal. So I rotated it just to be safe. I went to update it in Railway only to find out that I couldn't do deploys, so I also have a broken product. The good news is that it's only serving around 300 users, but still. Not great.
The customers of my company are angry. It is 9.45 AM here in SE Asia. Things are bad.
Same situation. Frankly unbelievable - how do you not lead with this? You can't tell customers to rotate their keys and not inform them in the same breath them that actually, environment variable updates currently cannot deploy.
They're actively firefighting an incident, and are likely going to make some mistakes along the way. In this case, they've erred on the side of security over availability, which in some cases is the better outcome. I know not in all, but some.
They did.
No. They did not. From https://blog.railway.com/p/security-disclosure-wednesday-oct... :
> What you should do: As such, we strongly recommend that you immediately roll all environment variables, including any API keys, stored in Railway, as well as any private registry credentials, and review logs for those services for unusual activity.
> All deployments are paused while we investigate. Until builds are restored, you will not be able to roll out new versions. We apologize for this inconvenience.
They lead with rotating keys.
Next, I did not realize that this meant not being able to restart an existing deployment to bring up new env vars. They also speak of builds. I don’t need a new build. I need my existing deployment to work.
It was not at all clear ‘paused’ mean this; maybe I should have realized, but I had interpreted it as doing new deployments or builds. New services. Code changes. New builds as they even say. It’s fully reasonable to pause that in this sort of situation and so I had interpreted their statement that way.
If there is a clear impact from following advice — ‘do what we recommend and your service will not function’ — those who provide that advice need to make that clear.
Their first message where they recommended rotating keys did not make that clear (though obviously if you cannot deploy, rotating keys means you will go down)
Yeah. OpenRouter disabled my keys because of this and now i'm in a catch-22
thought I was the only one, openrouter is auto disabling railway affiliated keys
Yeah, I had to rotate my data store keys ASAP. Now I'm stuck with a broken application. Best option, horrible option.
Crazy day for cybersecurity: PHP RCE, eMudhra certificates, and now Railway.
And it’s all just getting started imo.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/emudhra-certificate-compromise
https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
I think the pingcap hack might be the biggest of them all, somehow it has gone under the radar.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173716
Related ongoing thread:
PingCap TiDB Leaks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173716 - Oct 2026 (32 comments)
(It had only spent 3 hours on the frontpage so I re-upped it.)
I guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Surely you can't be serious
I am. And don't call me Shirly
I find it wild how much they have downplayed this in their statement. https://www.pingcap.com/trust-hub/security/security-update-o...
”An external incident response firm reviewed PingCAP’s production systems and found no evidence that the attacker ran commands or maintained persistent access in the systems reviewed”
hmm, I don't think that's true.
"Found no evidence" doesn't mean it didn't happen, it means the incident response firm didn't find it.
The evidence is in the blog post explaining how they did it. However seeing at how bad their operations were I doubt they have evidence of anything themselves
Plaid is listed as a customer. Good times.
That was a single company, the cert problem hit something like 70% of all websites and devices.
Honestly…I’ve never heard of pingcap
Same here. Nor have I heard of Railway.
Jesus that one is bad
Utterly humiliating.
Also GitLab
https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitla...
Also Shopify, they have been delisting a lot of apps without giving a reason, most lickely a supply chain attacked that spoofed/stol checkout data
Madness..
And about 50+ sev 9+ CVEs for the linux kernel
And litellm too
true =(
"It's just marketing" HN mostly told us
[dead]
Postiz founder posted on X that his service is being brought down, his keys were already used and Railway was quiet about this until he spoke up:
https://x.com/wickedguro/status/2113015432974405658
Why is a 300k mrr company (his tiwtter bio) running on raleway?
You may think that sounds like a very nice salary but $4MM annual gross is a very small business. I can’t imagine how Railway would be in business if that were considered a large customer.
Sure, I guess there are a ton of dumb people. But please name a few sites that aren't slop ecom fly by nights... I cant think of any serious business that runs on raleway.
I dont understand using any PaaS that essentially functions by arbitraging aws to people that are scared of an aws dashboard at a 3x markup.
Seems like a decent platform for toy projects not for enterprise.
Maybe I'm finally old, but I don't see how it's surprising that Raleway is at all successful. Heroku built the same business ~15 years ago and had plenty of "enterprise" clients. I don't really understand if there's that much more value in Raleway vs Vercel, and Vercel claims to have OpenAI and Meta as clients.
Never underestimate the power of good UX and tooling. I’m not really familiar with Railway, but Heroku (and Vercel) made their business around ease of use and good DX and tools. It’s sadly not a great long term business strategy because there a price point where it’s cheaper to pay someone to deal with AWS or Azure for you.
Yes, they should be charging 6x if they want to hunt the big fish.
> But please name a few sites that aren't slop ecom fly by nights.
https://railway.com/customers
tripadvisor and bilt, maybe?
It's pretty common to have "toy" infrastructure in a non-tech business
Not sure where you see TripAdvisor on there? And what even is bilt?
TripAdvisor is there in the scrolling names. Intuit and Congnizant too.
Of course "uses" doesn't mean they run critical services.
300K ARR means you get 300K in annual recurring revenue.
Subtract costs for employees. Which, given current economy and inflation, that gets you a founder scraping on their savings, one or two other people (remember that if you're paying someone unless it's totally offshored through a house which has it's own inflation, you have other factors) and then your own taxes... yeah... much more than that and you are in the black.
As a general factor I keep in mind, when I worked at a 'normal' but toxic place before I was an actual software engineer, my manager's rules were something like '40 percent L2R' (might have been lower) for in-house employees and 70- 80% L2R for contractors.
IOW, for every dollar billed for an actual employee, we paid the employee 40 cents. For every dollar billed for a contractor, we paid them 70-80 cents.
I've heard similar figures from others (e.x. 'in house employee has a real cost of 1.5-2x their actual pay').
And yes it sucks and yes the structure at least here in the US is a factor.
If your overhead for an employee is 60% you need to seriously rethink some things
You mean things in addition to your use of railway
MRR.Think before spewing slop
Lots of companies run on railway
Why not?
Why are you even commenting? And it's Railway not raleway.
User since 2011 and you’re asking this question?
Yup, got my OpenRouter key. They managed to run up a whole $2 on Opus 5.5 and Fable. Well, time for a new hosting provider I guess...
Incidentally, I'm testing Muse as an email triage agent today - it buried "oh also, railway and anthropic say yours keys have been leaked and you need to rotate asap" under 50 routine deploy / admin emails notifications. Oh to live through such an AI powered software renaissance!
Hahaha, you're giving Muse access to a mailbox? Good luck, have fun.
Right just as I take my first day off (for the entire year!) from work to fly out for a vacation. The mother of all security bombs starts dropping all around stacks and services that I am responsible for. How else could have taken time off go for me…
Brother do not cancel anything for these people, they do not care about you, it's their fault for not considering bus factor in their org chart. Why can't the person above you handle that?
Prioritize your mental health, go enjoy your vacation.
Thanks, yes I will. Left without the laptop(s). Let the chips fall where they lay. If they need me back so urgently, they will have to go through the full cancellation of booked flights and hotels first. Lets enjoy the time off.
I hope you don't check in on hackernews after this post here!
What if they do. Sec analyst terminated for being on holiday posting on a forum being on vacation without laptop, not cancelling his trip ?
I didn't read it as that, more as, "You might hear about other similar work-related bullshit here while you're trying to chill and not think about it".
Whoo hoo, enjoy! :D
Strongly concur
Not your problem. Enjoy your vacation. Bus factor of 1 is poor planning of leadership.
Either a) your company will reimburse you for your costs incurred and give you a different week off, or b) they don’t need you there that badly.
Take more days off. Today was my first day back after 2.5 weeks.
Services you were responsible for
I say this as a Railway customer, go take your vacation. The only time you should even reconsider is a massive bonus plus more time off for staying.
Correct me if I am wrong - if the API keys are compromised, then a large bill could be racked up?
Oh you're right, that does sound like a good reason for the original commenter to not take his vacation. Lucky the organisation he works for made him the single point of failure in circumstances such as these.
I had assumed the original commenter OWNED the company. Yes, I agree with you that if he is an employee then take the time off.
Ah yep, that would be a different story if that's the case (from reading his original comment I still think he is an employee though)
None of this matters if you zoom out.
Seen multiple folks in the Railway Discord confirming that their secrets stored in Railway have been used by third parties, so it definitely sounds like the attackers were able to read decrypted environment variables.
Environment variables are a terrible place to store secrets.
I'm just going to say it, since having said it non-stop for over 20 years, nobody seems to listen and we keep circling this drain.
The 12 Factor manifesto was 100% wrong on this point.
Use environment variables to point to where secrets are located, not to store their values.
> Use environment variables to point to where secrets are located, not to store their values.
Now your apps need to be able to read the secret that is pointed to, as opposed to the task runner populating the secret and the app would not know about the details.Not to mention the changes it entails to development.
> Not to mention the changes it entails to development.
Oh no, guess they'll have to hire developers that can adapt!
It doesn't sound like they got them via a shell environment, they just hacked into the place that stored them. If the place you store secrets can be hacked into, it doesn't really matter if they are injected into environment variables or not.
How does this help? If your container gets compromised it's trivial to exfiltrate the secrets.
Or we could just use our operating systems for the things we do well, and have a service to send our API calls to that inserts the appropriate token.
I don't have to enter my Mac's password every time I open an app.
Environment variables are generally fine for secrets. Environment files are problematic. Modern systems that inject secrets into the environment launch the program itself.
(pre-caveat thing to not be massively annoyingly pedantic throughout, I'm not a security buff and I know who it is I'm talking to, I'm not trying to correct them)
I'm not sure I get the difference - the issue I would have thought was having the system code have access to the secrets themselves? Env file vs env vars injected at runtime seems the same there - either can be exfiltrated. The difference would be having it injected when used.
Is the problem with files about what happens outside that, being committed, etc?
Everything can be exfiltrated. If you never store the environment in a durable file, it's not meaningfully easier to exfiltrate from the environment than from process memory. Most of the wisdom about the insecurity of environment variables falls out of people setting them in .profile or in .envrc files --- that's very bad, yes, as are configuration files (the thing 12 Factor Apps was responding to).
The headline here is that there's no reason to believe "environment variables" were the reason this data was breached; presumably, the database those variables came from was what actually got hit.
You can say "everything can be exfiltrated" but capturing my PC's password is about nigh unto impossible. The only way it can be captured is if a program has active control over the keyboard controller/associated drivers when I type in the password to unlock it.
These problems were all solved a long time ago.
systemd makes it easy: https://systemd.io/CREDENTIALS/
I have a bad gut feeling that every day is going to look a bit like today with endless urgent patches and breaches.
Fwiw it sounds similar to the hack over the weekend that opencode suffered.
The security team at my company is working with a frontier lab to scan all our code/systems. They are in a borderline panic to close every possible issue, even innocuous ones that are buried under defense in depth. Whatever they are seeing from our partner has them spooked -- as in "acceptable risk" is no longer a thing anymore.
I fully believe the only sustainable future is that hot patching will need to itself become fully automated. Hot patch now with a minimal allowed amount of line changes to head off the AIs, review it in office hours for auditing and the team is actually awake.
My second belief is that environment variables as a development concept will need to be retired. If it's something that causes a security breach if it by its mere existence on a public git repo, it is information that by design cannot ever pass to a filesystem out of a chain of trust, not by mere development conventions people choose to adhere to.
> hot patching will need to itself become fully automated.
Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.
Due to the small nature of hot patching (eg. bump this dependency, rotate these keys, turn off that config, follow the runbook) it will unlikely need to be a frontier model and is likely able to be done LocalLLM/Jev style decision making rather than having to hand all the keys to frontier model operators.
One more step to just turning it all over to Skynet. It's hilarious how prophetic that movie was.
Do you want your shit hacked? Better patch.
Hot patching is itself a liability
Not reacting is a liability. Blue-Green deployment is a liability. Code is itself a liability. Choosing this career at all is a liability.
For the record, there was a bunch of non-functional vibe coded fixes flying around during this PHP bug. If you were just running the first thing AI made because you were worried about "not reacting," you would likely end up running a crap script.
AI is quite good at finding vulnerabilities, but it's been rough for patching them. The old adage "defenders have to be right every time, attackers only have to be right once" applies to AI security patches.
Great, but the fact remains that easy hot patching which skips normal review is going to open you up to many of the same liabilities you're trying to minimize by introducing it. The target just shifts, and people will attack that infrastructure.
The actual solution largely involves the same technologies but in reverse: leveraging AI for live security monitoring, better correctness validation and security testing before code goes live, etc. And of course more pressure to use battle-tested widely-adopted libraries and systems, even though of course that comes with its own tradeoffs.
Importantly, as an engineer, when someone tells you something has liabilities or tradeoffs, the response is not "Everything is a liability, existing is a liability"; that is unprofessional. The appropriate response is to engage with them on these tradeoffs and working through the best ones, because that's your job. Otherwise defer to security engineers who are ready to back up their arguments. It could be as simple as following up with, "But do you think those liabilities outweigh the benefits of hot patching without proper review? What are some of the main liabilities you see, and what methods/technologies do you think properly address them?"
With AI, in the long term open source code might actually become more secure than obfuscated closed source, since it's had so many more (AI) eyes looking at it.
The internet is over. We are going back to static htmls for public pages, and Point to Point VPN bases connections for B2B service provision.
B2C? too risky to publish services online haha.
Static HTML, yeah.
Not sure about VPN. Seems likely to provide a false sense of security.
Still some industries where you cable colocated servers in a shared DC together where neither server has internet access.
Consider using spiped.
http://www.tarsnap.com/spiped.html
>We are going back to static htmls for public pages...
God yes, please. I backpack and mountaineer in the PNW and have been trying to research trip ideas up in British Columbia, and as a result I discovered https://bivouac.com.
Here's a website that's still frequently used by a large number of people as a valuable resource, is regularly updated and maintained, and yet looks like it's straight out of 1995.
Every pages loads instantaneously, everything is simple yet packed with detail, and it's such a basic, straightforward, delightfully pleasant experience to just browse through the site. I was so thrilled after just 5 minutes on the site that I threw them $25 for a year's full access.
Sorry for the tangent, but oh man, it's such a refreshingly stark contrast to the rest of the bullshit that fills the web these days.
[flagged]
It's only just starting. It'll get worse before it gets better.
I think the only way out is to go back to on-prem for everything, like in the 00s.
LAN cables will go up in price soon.
Ha, Cyberpunk 2077 is becoming reality. We're proposing the Blackwall.
That was always going to happen. The future of the internet is AIs scamming you and your grandmother, ransomwaring you, draining your back accounts, etc. There will be no reason or rhyme, it's simply a function of available compute and ease of automation, both of which have reached a critical threshold.
"So you want to build your own data center?"
https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one
I think we'll see a reduction in complexity and an increase in transparency, rather than just on-prem.
One medium-sized server can now easily serve the entire banking system of a large country. So you don't need clusters of servers with careful tradeoffs between consistency and availability because of the CAP theorem.
Just get a big honking host, slap Postres on it, and run your application server in a VM on the same host. For backup, export the WAL logs from Postgres onto your favorite off-site blob storage. UI for it? There's Pigsty.
It still makes sense to host this in a cloud provider, just because you probably don't want to deal with actual hardware. And maybe get a second standby server for redundancy.
That's it.
You'll need a bunch of external dependencies for email, 2FA, observability, LLMs, and so on. But they should all be outgoing dependencies that should not allow access back into your system.
Real loads are too spiky for that.
A PostgreSQL server on an NVMe can handle several _million_ simple requests per second. This is bonkers.
Do you think you can hit these load levels? For compute, a 64-core CPU can saturate a 10G network with simple template rendering. If the code is written in something reasonably fast (Go, Rust, Java).
Of course, if you're on a scale of Amazon or Stripe, you'll need more than that.
How does on-prem help if your product is a SaaS.
You open a SaaS shop where people come to use it
Instead of being a SaaS it will need to just become a S
You put the SaaS into a Box your customers can install into their datacenter!
What a brave new concept!
Sometimes I do miss owning the hardware to run a thing.
What I don't miss was having all of those appliances run a different base distro of Linux, each with varying levels of update support, while the security team keeps reading security scans to me.
Like back when you could rent a Google appliance.
surely once there's been enough patches the code will be perfect though?
Train wreck. People were writing on discord 3 hours ago, 10 hours after the incident started, that keys created just for railway were running up usage. Meanwhile builds have been down for more than 12 hours. Only NOW did they just send out an email to all customers. I wouldn't have found out until then if I wasn't checking the discord periodically.
Hi Angelo from Railway here. This is very much me. https://x.com/ngeloxyz/status/2113077263386239309?s=20
We have gotten a lot of comments about why didn't we just message the breach sooner when people have noticed compromise with their accounts. I think that crit is fair and justified, and although we have been up for days on end- I don't blame you if you don't have sympathy for us.
Our thought process was that we didn't want to recommend that people roll keys when we couldn't possibly confirm that we confidently plugged the breach and rolled the mitigation(s). I am comfortable to publicly say that this was a highly motivated attacker. Meanwhile, our threat team mitigates DDoSes, CVEs, while been patching everything immediately as dealt with exploits.
As for this breach in particular, we tried to balance a duty to warn, which we take very seriously... However, it took a significant amount of time on the order of hours to verify, reviewing, and keep up with the attacker as they attempted to move laterally around, and briefly, within the system. We didn't want message anything beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were no further exploit paths.
We take the view that we would like to "aviate, navigate, then communicate" when we deal with incidents like these then we prepared communications to the public and all users. While it was ongoing, we were in contact with external partners and vendors to revoke keys (the source of some online chatter) with investigators that required time and coordination.
On the incident side of the house, it's a suite of bad options, we're still in the middle of it making sure customers are safe. But, hopefully this offers a view into our thought process.
Formal postmortem after we fully restore service and complete the investigation. Apologies to all, I personally I feel like I let everyone down.
> and although we have been up for days on end- I don't blame you if you don't have sympathy for us.
From my timezone, this started last night and is ongoing into today. Has this been going for longer than the status page and email indicated? If so, why was notification delayed so long?
I love your product, have an incredible amount of sympathy for you as humans (having been in similar sleep-consuming nightmares) and was willing to forgive the GCP-triggered outage as an understandable teething pain, but sadly this response has really knocked my confidence.
I understand the hard reality of security issues -- "urgently rotate your keys, they're already compromised" is an important message to share -- but "sorry, that will also require your site going down because we've blocked deploys" (presumably as a response to the incident...) is an incredibly frustrating situation to find ourselves in.
I also want to briefly note that communicating, from the outset, "this is a significant incident, your keys are compromised, the attack is ongoing and you cannot enter new keys as _those too will be compromised_" is a better response than leaving people to figure out the unfortunate combo endpoint of "my keys are compromised, I have rotated them, this has broken my site but I have new keys, and oh surprise, I can't deploy". The full story needed to be communicated more clearly; the email just said "revoke your keys", which I urgently did... and then remembered/found out that changing environment variables requires a deploy.
I would rather have known earlier that I should put a notice on my site, or my own social media, or notify my own customers ASAP and disable some functionality (or make my own choice about porting somewhere else as a mitigation) than get caught out like this after the horse has bolted and it turns out you've been desperately trying to get it back into the paddock for days.
"aviate, navigate, then communicate" only matters if you are the one in control of outcomes.
Customers could have simply revoked keys and not re-launched services with rolled credentials (that from your post, may have been re-stolen), but instead you let this fester.
What a disaster for Railway. I hope you get through this stressful moment, but this should be the end of Railway.
I was a loyal railway customer for a while, but this response smacks of "we didn't want people to know" instead of "we wanted to take responsibility."
The options railway has given us are "rotate your keys and bring down your service" or "keep your service up and let the exposed keys remain at risk." Kind of a crap position, no? Mistakes are going to happen, but when the suggested mitigations are to stab yourself in the leg or stab yourself in the ass, it's hard to be sympathetic.
I have to imagine quite a few users are asking their agents to port their stacks over to alternate providers like I am. The cost of switching has never been cheaper thanks to AI.
You know... I get it.
IMO "aviate, navigate, then communicate" does not work in this situation. There is more than one pilot. The moment you detected a breach, hell, even knowing that an attacker was inside your system, you should have pointed to anyone. Hell, even AI, to draft a disclosure with more info coming.
I had an Anthropic API key that was used in a Railway deployment be disabled due to evidence of unauthorized abuse ~3hrs after receiving the Railway security notice. They managed to spend about $20 in Opus 4.8 tokens before the abuse was detected. What a headache.
After the last outage we considered moving off to Cloud Run - used it several times before and it is rock solid - but we gave them another chance. Unlikely we are staying after a day of no deployments and then this.
Rotated all our secrets but since deploys are paused our app is down.
I'm unimpressed.
Agreed. This feels like an abandon ship situation. I’m working on switching right now. That’s too bad, but this is not acceptable unfortunately
Jeez, what a rough past 24 hours for all security folk. Hang in there
It's going to be a rough decade.
I really don't know how we are going to deal with accelerated exploit generation via LLMs — it blows up the disclosure processes we've evolved.
The only thing I can think of is hunkering down with static HTML to reduce attack surface, but that's laughably incompatible with many many business requirements.
In new software I write these days I limit the number of external dependencies and mostly vibe code anything I need besides the most critical foundational libraries (increasingly I am replacing these as well).
I think this, the supply chain attacks and binary reverse engineering will cause us to go back to thin clients, html over the wire and vibe coded libs instead of external open source deps.
Vibe coding deps is security through obscurity, with all of its weaknesses (and strengths). It's not that such deps have fewer security bugs than the open source reference implementations from which they are derived, it's just that those bugs are currently less discoverable.
In the near to medium term, the current open source regime has issues because bugs have become extremely discoverable and easy to exploit. But I am skeptical that obscurity will provide vibe coded deps sufficient protection over the long term. As soon as the source code for those vibe-coded deps leaks, you are screwed.
It's not just obscurity, it's increasingly difficult to trust the governance and quality of code of any outside library. A lot of deps in code are unnecessary you use maybe 1-10% of the api surface. But since building and maintaining software can be cheaper now it can be better to maintain a 1-5k LOC vibe coded version that meets your security bar than to trust an external party's governance & quality. This has the additional benefit of reconsidering if you even need the dep or if you can reuse something you already have (since you may not want to maintain the lib).
> it's increasingly difficult to trust the governance and quality of code of any outside library
The value of 'code written before 2024' is going to be substantially higher than of code written afterwards.
Sort of like a 'low background steel', a comparison someone made on HN before which I think was pretty good.
I really doubt that. If these models continue to improve, they will be producing higher quality code than, maybe not the best human developers, but certainly the average human developer who would have typically been writing code on these systems.
Pre-2024 code is full of human-written vulnerabilities.
This only applies to its value in regards to training data for LLMs.
No, it will also be reflected in the value of IP.
Limiting the number of dependencies is always good, within reason. Especially with eco-systems that want to pull in everything and the kitchen sink. That's just asking for a supply chain attack. I try to limit myself to what well reputed distros provide and what I can review. That's still no guarantee but it cuts down the risk substantially.
I think it will kill open source to some degree. I found it already very hard to imagine how the endless queues of issues were being dealt with so diligently, but at least there was a human on the other side. The torrent that is unleashed now is not manageable on a human scale. It's a highly automated arms race with a bunch of good-willing humans caught in the crossfire between large companies and criminals duking it out.
Could open source activity transition towards provably correct software, with far more modest feature sets?
I don't have experience with proof based tools, so I'm not sure what's feasible.
A lot of people in the open source world actually enjoy the act of programming. Not all of them will enjoy prompting to the same degree, but to keep pace with the bad guys you will have to either join or find something else to do. That's going to be a big loss.
It's funny, that's true although I personally can't relate — I enjoy having built something robust, but the act of building isn't something I love.
I can imagine prompting an LLM to build provably correct software. Aren't we already doing something similar already when we remind it to write unit tests and account for all edge cases?
Actually writing provably correct software from scratch sounds terribly tedious, which is why I've never explored it. But maybe an LLM could make that task more approachable.
I switch between the two modes. I love algorithmic stuff and I really don't like working on boilerplate and plumbing. So I use AI for the second and read every line and all the other stuff I roll by hand. The speedup isn't super like that but the amount of control is pretty good.
I just gave this prompt to duck.ai (5.6 Terra under the hood): "How would one go about writing a provably correct algorithm to count UTF-8 code points?"
It gave me something which looked pretty legit. Of course, the generated output very likely to be subtly wrong, but as starting input to a formal checked specification/proof process it seemed like a good start.
I wrote some UTF-8 based string handling software back in the day. It doesn't seem unreasonable to write up a set of requirements and edge cases and then have a formal mechanism prove correctness for common UTF-8 string manipulation operations.
[PEAK HN ON] Now if we could just write provably correct exception handling, we could solve one of the two PHP vulns from today. [PEAK HN OFF]
UTF8 is one nasty little standard. So many edge cases.
I should check it against my email address validator that would be a nice benchmark. It's interesting that there are people that are using email addresses that are not actually valid according to the standard.
But UTF-8 is also extremely well-studied.
We can have an LLM enumerate all those edge cases, and we can assemble them into a spec. Then we can integrate that spec into a proof.
And because the spec is functional rather than expressive, we can produce copyright-free, provably correct reference implementations whose correctness is as strong as our spec and our proof process.
This reference implementation would then be available for use by a language like PHP, or perhaps an LLM generating a vibe-coded dependency.
Over time, then, the accumulation of such proven reference works grows. We'll never prove all the application code out there correct, but incremental progress is possible.
I think such constructs should be part of the language or at least of the standard runtime library and not re-implemented by every Tom, Dick, Harriet & HAL.
Business requirements will have to change. All your competitors are under the same pressure with the same shitty set of options, after all.
That would have to start with businesses shelling out more funds for the packages that their businesses depend on.
It already _is_ a rough decade. I have hated the 20s so damn much.
Yeah, the future of our jobs in this industry... for the type of work we do. are concerning. Explosure has whole new meaning
It feels like the only solution is going to be proactively running your own AI agents looking for patches and applying them.
The issue is where to direct the LLM's attention.
Prompting the LLM to "look for vulnerabilities in PHP's multipart upload handling code" is going to find stuff that "look for vulnerabilities in PHP" won't.
I was more talking about staying up on security issues with your stack after they are patched. We will need to check for security updates constantly, or risk being exploited in the gap between a security release and you finding out that you need to update your software.
Does any one know of good feeds that we should be pulling or scraping from? I think the proactive nature here is seriously important.
Yes, so who will pay for that? Open source so far meant you would use your brains and your creativity, now you need to use your money too if you want to keep pace. From a 'guts, credits & glory' proposition to 'slop processor if you can afford it' is not really an upgrade.
Or, you know, use client certificates so the bots can’t hit you.
Those can leak / be stolen of course, but a bunch of my clients php apis survived as without a cert they’re told to fuck right off.
It does make their client onboarding a bit harder but it’s a trade off which seems to have been the right one.
This doesn’t help you if you need to run a public website.
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I'm already tired, between pushing back on vibe coded internal projects being put onto the internet and then the constant barrage of CVEs that mean nothing.
Then you have real security incidents that you need to tune into constantly.
job security!
How is it possible rotate keys if you disable deployments? You're basically telling us to take our services offline...
What about buckets? I tried to regenerate my secrets but deploys are paused. I don't know if they actually rotated or not because the old keys seem to still be working! Dear attackers, please don't read or mutate my files while my app is offline :)
yeah .. this is the suck
I've already taken my applications offline and will be migrating to a new host...
In general, the new host will have its own problems, otherwise you would've used them to begin with.
I'm curious where you decided to go
I moved to Render 3 or 4 months ago during Railway’s big GCP outage and have been very pleased.
Yep. What an incredibly frustrating notice. I like Railway and I guess their hands are tied here, but wow.
I rotated mine. If you just change the keys and hit deploy it works
Saw someone on Twitter indicating that they did this, and new keys got compromised.
Link?
It appears to work in the UI, but go test your product. Mine didn't receive the new keys.
Genuinely curious: how much liability insurance do you need to survive something like this?
Anyone can help?
I changed he api key in the env var as openrouter revoke the previous one based on this incident. However, as the redeploy cannot be done in my region, the env cannot be updated and now the product cannot be used. Any command in railway to fix this?
Do cloud providers have a lock-down mode where you can press 1 button and stop all spend?
Not a bad idea
It is… for their business.
how are the secrets decrypted, I would like some explanation so that I can have some understanding here, I am starting to feel like all these companies are just meme-ing with their security posture.
Like did someone vibe code too hard, how do env secrets leak for everyone...
They absolutely are. Every ceo sees security as a massive money pit (it is) but there’s a reason it’s expensive and hard to do well. Those compliance frameworks they show off are meaningless and can be manipulated extremely easily. There are a lot of security leaders who are going to be having a very bad time soon.
Easy, all the bad guys need to do is access whatever system stores the decryption keys.
It's time for competent programmers to get rehired to help patch massive exploits that are about to unfold before us.
What stopped them from building the systems competently when they were employed?
Railway was not honest about the reason for their last big outage.
sighs
Thankfully I'm only using Railway for a hobby project (aptly, for a real-time transit dashboard) but still
It’s funny that every security breach disclosure now has a mandatory “the attacker used AI!” as if it absolves you from having to maintain a secure system. If anything it makes the situation more damning. If it was possible to find exploits using AI then your own red teaming should have found them before the attacker did.
Defending is so much harder than attacking. You don't even have to focus on one target, as you can just mass-AI-script a lot of attacks wherever it's possible, and see what sticks. Even if you did everything right, there's always the social-engineering angle, or a single compromised device, or just accidental bad upgrade through supply chain. If you can mass-spread the seed, and plant something that "calls home" constantly, you can just have an agent that would start the attack the minute it gets infected, and go deeper.
It's really a wild west right now, have no idea how we fix it. I'm assuming everything will get more concentrated in big co's hands, as having a very robust security is extremely hard.
Also, we have to agree that younger people will start companies. There will be small companies that cannot afford red teams. There will be companies that are just not equipped, and their profit margins cannot sustain constant attacks.
> It’s funny that every security breach disclosure now has a mandatory “the attacker used AI!”
This isn't in the article? They do not at all claim "the attacked used AI!".
The only mention of "AI" is "We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers." This is the same (apparently) end-goal as the Opencode breach last week, and is not blaming or finger-point at AI. It is stating (rightfully) that AI inference is very easy to resell and turn stolen credentials into cash.
> your own red teaming should have found them before the attacker did
Easier said than done. The defender has to do everything right, all the time, to prevent a headline like this. The attacker only needs to be right once, and it's game over. AI or no AI.
It's a nice saying, but if you did enough things right, the attacker still needs multiple things to line up in order to get anything of value, if you get everything right. No one competent who's doing everything right is leaving open S3 buckets open to the world. Doing some things right means using multiple buckets, using multiple time limited-keys with limited read-only access, using special write-access, not having admin keys on developer laptops, a SIEM system that monitors buckets for traffic going in & out and sending emails (both amount and who it's going to) to the person on call. A firewall (inc IP-address-based blocks so eg China can't access the customer data from China at all). A WAF.
That's not an exaustive list but if the attacker gets one of those "right" once, it is not game over. (They aren't of equal strength, mind you.)
Show me a perfectly secure complex system, and with enough time, I'll show you a vulnerability.
Unless they edited the post, they never said this. You should delete this; it's false information.
I didn’t actually see that in this post at all. They mention that the end goal of the attackers might be to get to AI inference providers. But I don’t think they are crying “AI was used” here.
Or did I miss something?
We (Railway) make no claims about the tools the attacker used in the above post.
However, from discussions with partners, it resembled the pattern of attacks to secure AI API tokens and credentials. Preliminary forensics tell us that this was the primary goal of their attack. That said, I want to be careful here commenting until we have our formal public post-mortem.
This one doesn’t?
meanwhile on railway.com:
Ship software peacefully
This is so fucked up. I was reviewing my account and I just saw this in the logs... Claude says database credentials and bucket credentials go in via env vars so likely they had access to database and bucket contents.
I'm rotating production secrets all night... great. I confirmed that they've actually used many of my secret keys already.
Which secrets were they using?
So far I found they accessed my S3 buckets, used my OpenAI key (which OpenAI thankfully detected odd behaviour and revoked the key automatically), did readonly operations on my Valkey instance, etc.
The secret ones
The past two days have been awful as someone who uses Railway.
i revoked my api keys, changed with new ones but guess what? railway does not allow deployments at the moment, so my app is down.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177413
Huh, I've been using Railway tonight and this was the first I've seen of this. Just got an email about it now too at 23:36
If you're on Railway do not wait, ROTATE every API key at the source, and do not set new values because Railway is still compromised and not secured.
> We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers.
So basically, the same shit as in the crypto heydays - rich techbros providing extremely lucrative incentives for unscrupulous actors to hack anyone and anything.
Is this our new AI daily reality?
script kiddies now have access to frontier models. bad
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companies probably have php and Python applications exposed to the web and nobody knows.
the speed of irresponsible deployments is infinite now, by design
someone managed to get the environment variables AND the encryption keys for those? i feel for the secops engineers over there right now. brutal
I’m lucky I moved away from it to host my own db with coolify
That’s coming for all platforms unfortunately
Take coolify admin off the web, put it on a private address only accessible via tailscale
Damn I guess all those l33t hiring practices were for nothing
Of course, it was a giant scam that tested for nothing and optimized for how to pass a test.
Let's see if companies are ready to hire more people who know what they are doing, against a super-intelligent swarm of millions of agents with cyber capabilities.
Actually I will move my projects away from Railway. With AI what it is today, no reason to shy away from hosting on actual VPS.
What is the best VPS to use today? Is it still hetzner or ovh?
Ugh. Love Railway.
Aw shit. I just got done patching our PHP servers, now I gotta do the Railway too? I swear I'm gonna wake up to a Vercel SNAFU.
We are not manifesting this energy
Yeah I’m not sure what happened but there was a huge bot swarm the last few days
I had an open gitea host pulled into some botnet
Luckily digitaloceam sent an alert.
Well this is certainly interesting, I wonder how their secrets were being stored, I assumed they were stored in vault and then injected with a sidecar, but I guess not
the worst service I've signed up for has to be railway. What a terrible product.
Fuck, I thought this was about trains
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>We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers.
Is that an accusation? As in, major AI players taking out competitors ?
It's a cop-out and cheap attempt at misdirection to distract from their incompetence.
I don’t think that’s what’s implied here. Possibly they are trying to get API tokens of providers to distill their own models.
This is exactly why we should own our deployment stacks. Going to push up the launch here as pdt is a railway alternative thttps://github.com/autoidm/pdt for scheduled jobs
AI makes this so much easier to do now, we should all own our own code, and deployment infrastructure (use a cloud instead of someone wrapping aws for you)
Do you own argcomplete, backoff, certifi, cffi, charset-normalizer, cryptography, google-auth, google-auth-oauthlib, idna, markdown-it-py, mdurl, msal, oauthlib, pyasn1, pyasn1-modules, pycparser, pygments, pyjwt, python-dotenv, pyyaml, requests, requests-oauthlib, rich, rich-argparse, shellingham, and urllib3?
No, and this isn't about a supply chain attack on Python libs. This is about running your service(s) on a service that runs in front of a cloud provider. My argument is simply that it's needless extra risk
You do have an argument to be made about vendoring our dependencies, or removing them in general. Not a bad idea