Crazy day for cybersecurity: PHP RCE, eMudhra certificates, and now Railway.
And it’s all just getting started imo.
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:
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 just dont understand it. But please name a few that aren't slop ecom sites...
I dont understand using any PaaS that essentially functions by arbitraging aws to people that are scared of an aws dashboard.
Seems like a decent platform for toy projects not for enterprise.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
Still some industries where you cable colocated servers in a shared DC together where neither server has internet access.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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 is it possible rotate keys if you disable deployments? You're basically telling us to take our services offline...
I've already taken my applications offline and will be migrating to a new host...
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.
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.
I'm rotating production secrets all night... great. I confirmed that they've actually used many of my secret keys already.
It's time for competent programmers to get rehired to help patch massive exploits that are about to unfold before us.
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...
Easy, all the bad guys need to do is access whatever system stores the decryption keys.
Ugh. Love Railway.
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
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.
I’m lucky I moved away from it to host my own db with coolify
That’s coming for all platforms unfortunately
Is this our new AI daily reality?
companies probably have php and Python applications exposed to the web and nobody knows.
the speed of irresponsible deployments is infinite now, by design
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.
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?
This one doesn’t?
The past two days have been awful as someone who uses Railway.
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.
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?
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.
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 ?
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
I guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Jesus that one is bad
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..
Any guesses as to source attribution? It seems too many to be multiple different orgs.
And about 50+ sev 9+ CVEs for the linux kernel
And litellm too
true =(
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