I hope this is a real wake-up call for teams running anything remotely SaaS-shaped. I count at least six substantial, lightning-speed attacks against multi-tenant as-a-service vendors since September. Not this year--just since last month. PingCAP/TiDB, Fireworks AI, Zeabur, OpenCode Console, Railway, now Northflank. All of them modern "we keep your content safe" players with high hopes and probably pretty good protections.
This is a full infosec emergency unfolding here. No matter how grinding it is to motivate a team to invest in protection or resilience (and it is grinding): We gotta get ready. Stat! The AI-accelerated attacker apocalypse has begun. It's boom, boom, boom, thanks for everything, on to the next. They have us sighted and are firing for effect.
So credential rotation, tripwire secrets, DFIR on standby, solid vulnerability and intrusion detection, real listening to that signal, minimized blast radius, spending caps and time limits and tight scoping on credentials, fast incident alerting... We need to get on a real war footing here.
A trick i've started doing is encrypting my env vars, then hard-code the decryption key in the code
that way if the provider gets popped, they need my binary to decrypt it
it shouldn't be necessary and it sounds stupid, but in cases like this, it proves invaluable (it appears they don't have customer code/binary access, but maybe that wasn't important enough to mention)
I think this is a great example of temporarily effective "security through obscurity." It's also a trick that will only continue to work so long as it doesn't get adopted too widely.
At this point, I kinda feel like the obscurity is our best mechanism for mitigation :(
I will give you one better - encrypt the variables and move the secrets to a different server running hashicorp. Then load the secrets and keep them only in RAM.
Or env1 is the key to decrypt env2
Been doing something like this for a while with a single self contained .sh file that contains a python script:
if the provider gets popped doesn't the binary get popped too? then simply use an LLM to reverse engineer the binary and get the key?
Unfortunately for infra startups, I think we're going to see a convergence back to hyperscalers as a result of incidents like this and railway.
There's no amount of "nicer to use" that can replace security, at least certainly when selling to enterprises
I actually think it’s the opposite. I think people will move back to their own hardware with OSS deployment like dokku. If everything is more bespoke the attack surface is smaller as is the pay off. Hacking railway got access to lots of api keys, hacking some random vps gets less payoff.
> If everything is more bespoke the attack surface is smaller
This is exactly the problem that LLM assisted attacks solve. For a human attacker, the extra work to figure out a bespoke solution is too time consuming to be worth the effort. LLMs can search for vulnerabilities and spit out bespoke attacks like it's nothing. On top of this the bespoke solutions weakness leans heavily into the AI attackers advantage: response time. Even if they can just get your company's single Anthropic key, if they do it at 2am while your one infra person is on vacation, they have plenty of time to extract enough value for their effort.
I agree with the move to hyperscalers. The future (well, actually present) is going to be constantly seeing new attacks happening. The only real solution to this going to be having teams of people and agents constantly watching for these and able to deploy fixes and respond to risks immediately.
You’re technically right, which is the best type of right, but my point is the fragmentation and lower reward will make discovery harder, and the value of searching and cracking less worth the effort.
I had a html game I built for my niece on railway with an open ai API key so she could vibe code changes. No hacker would have looked for it but now I am catching strays because railway was a juicy target. Hyper scalers would be the same. Some random colo not so much.
>and the value of searching and cracking less worth the effort.
This is depending on the cost of tokens not trending towards zero. Maybe not today, but in a couple of years I'd expect hacking models on asics to reduce this to almost nothing and the systems being very competent in using deterministic tools very well.
> LLM assisted attacks solve
Yes, LLMs can easily knock over your on-prem docker appliances.
But you can still put stuff out of reach. I'm currently designing a key on-prem appliance that is can be compiled down to transistors, giving deterministic wire-speed performance while ruling out RCEs. It's cryptographically homomorphic: it processes authorized inputs but doesn't know what they mean, so an attacker who obtains the disk doesn't benefit either. The design will be highly resistant to exploits, and is likely to remain outside the "next-token" prediction training set.
This is the kind of thing AWS won't sit down and engineer for you. But thanks to LLMs I finally have the time.
How is that ever going to work out? The speed of discovery for LLMs is so fast, these places are getting breached more often than not due to a human errors. Its really hard for machines, let alone humans, to guard against a lot of LLMs going against them 24x7.
It's much easier to protect yourself if you have your infra behind a perimeter firewall you control.
You can scratch Cisco from the list - they just announced they will re-vibecode all of their codebase! So there will not be any explots for their hardware in the future - one way or the other. ;-)
Or there's some exploit in an endpoint device, and the problem moves laterally from inside your firewall.
Yep, but the attack surface is much smaller!
My hate for hyperscalers is greater than my hate of being SRE.
It's time to leave GCP, AWS, and the rest.
Google and Amazon markup can eat it. Fuck those guys.
Let's not forget that Google and Amazon tried to offshore us, played a role in inventing the labor-displacing models in the first place, and that don't give a shit about any of us.
I hope they ossify and turn into the next IBMs.
They thought AI would lead to growth and a greater concentration of wealth for themselves, but it's actually the seeds of their own destruction and dismantlement.
yeah remove the door locks, the thief can just break the window
Good like trying to explain to your customers that their data is no more accessible because some api key ended up in a public git repo or since you admin panel is exposed to whole internet someone was able to log in.
With the speed of exploitation hitting right now your analysis will be out of date in a few weeks to months. We are about to have very palpable fear hitting all software vendors. It will be seen as irresponsible to use centralized systems
Especially when the customers' own websites or services are down, they are a lot more understanding.
Having employees (or system like bastion hosts) with unrestricted access is one of the recurring mistakes in such events. I can’t understand it.
And so? This is true for any kind of infra!
You can't defend yourself from everything, but you can try to make you life easier by reducing the attack surface and make side movements more difficult.
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No self-service sign up for your app. No public access to the app itself. Website that let's you submit a sign up request form. Team reaches out and reviews your request, creates an account in the app dash for you, and you set up mTLS to get access to the dash.
Security question 2: You reach down and flip the tortoise onto its back…
You joke, but the space I work in actually does do video calls (or in our case in-person meetings if they're local to SF, often) before onboarding new customers.
An exploit in what, the network stack of the Linux distro you're using for the mTLS proxy? Or the crypto module? Sure, could happen. But then, you're unlikely to be the top target of anything.
Or do you mean a customer was running it?
For one, I have strict iptable rules to drop inbound from outside my specific commercial subnet and my specific residential IP. After that, all the usual best practices.
Breaking a lock still costs approximately the same, whether the lock is protecting a small barn or a huge hangar. A large number of small but reasonably tough (not unbreakable) targets makes the payoff per target smaller. This necessitates target selection, and chances of being deliberately skipped grow for an average target.
Everyone knows Fort Knox has gold, and where it is, that’s railway, heroku. No one knows where my personal safe is or whether it has anything worth taking. That’s a vps in a colo
However, the large hangar is likely to have armed guards inside, or at least able to arrive on the scene within two minutes of the alarm tripping. Your regular household with their regular locks on their regular doors does not.
This is absolutely happening. I'm not a developer in SV, I'm an IT leader out on customer land, and I can tell you a LOT of companies are looking to bring things back on prem for security and cost reasons. And before anyone laughs, yes, you ABSOLUTELY can save money going on prem, I've done it for company after company. It's one reason the PE firm that I've worked under for a decade kept moving me to new companies.
Let them laugh. Self hosting is much easier with OSS that solves most of the pain that made the cloud transition worth it, and commodity hardware has been cheap and capable for over a decade.
Sadly these relatively recent price bumps on hardware have made on-prem a bit of a harder sell for some.
My company just did this. Still using AWS S3 but everything else is on-prem with kubernetes.
That sounds insanely expensive. AWS S3 only makes sense if your workload is also in AWS. Using AWS S3 while having your compute elsewhere is a recipe for an insane egress bill.
There's plenty of OSS drop-in replacements for S3.
This is misguided thinking. You are less likely to hear about on-prem breaches in the news just because they are less likely to be newsworthy incidents, but they are even more likely to happen. Part of the reason people moved to the cloud is because it is much easier to have a team manage updates and security at scale.
Being a small target is not helpful these days, attacks on on-prem software today simply scans the internet, or uses databases by people who have already scanned it, and is automated.
On-prem software has not been spared from the recent spat of security incidents.
There is a difference of the security of software running in your cloud resources rented from AWS etc. managed by you and being a tenant in many SaaS systems all cobbled together all running on rented hardware. There is a lot more attack surface and a lot more diffusion of responsibility.
My comment[0] tries to explain the nuance and I would agree with you and both the GP in some sense.
For Entreprise, the shift will be towards hyperscalers as they want trust and less blame (Nobody got fired for picking AWS)
For consumers, we care about pricing and stability and control and we will move back to our own hardware or cheap VPS providers and self-host things.
The middle ground would be where the slight pain could be at in my opinion.
> For consumers <snip> self-host things.
That's not how consumers work. That's a nerd/geek/hobbyist mentality.
If Ikea and Wayfair went out of business you wouldn't expect consumers too take up woodworking and build their own furniture en masse.
For consumers/small orgs, how is the security at a cheap VPS provider going to be any better than at a cheap IaaS provider?
Until your VPS provider has its management dashboard breached, allowing an attacker remote console and configuration access to your VMs and everything that enables.
It's probably both.
Cost of hacking a custom setup is going down rapidly. There was broad agreement that the PHP vulnerability was very difficult to exploit in practice. It took two hours for someone to get into Steal My Bitcoin. Apparently all they did was tell a decent model "go exploit that." AI isn't free but it's not that expensive.
If you have to hack 1,000,000 custom setups to get the same results as one hyperscaler, would you bother?
Depends on what takes more effort. It's not at all clear to me that the 1,000,000 custom setups takes more effort. The first few will take some, then you'll start to see patterns and it'll get easier as you go. Custom setups aren't going to be all that unique in practice.
No thats an old way of thinking because it assumes mass targets are better because hacking is a high effort activity. But with the automation of intellect the unpatched systems (which a much more numerous when everyone self hosts) is the key point.
Mass credential stealing is just the top funnel of hacking and (compatativly) isnt that lucrative - these credentials are then sold on the black markets to the next step of hackers who use them to exploit targets.
With unpatched systems and self hosting, this second group can just set an llm at a target and have a much higher chance of success without needing credentials
It would be a dream for the infiltration hackers to have everyone self host. Unpatched and miscondigured systems would be everywhere and LLM automation could make mass scanning them and exploiting them very attractive - not mass scanning and exploiting them for credentials stealing, no! For layer 2 stuff
> There's no amount of "nicer to use" that can replace security, at least certainly when selling to enterprises
Azure would beg to differ.
None of my customers / clients / coworkers have ever used Azure and "nicer to use" in the same sentence.
and it wasn't what he was saying, the "nicer to use" in the context were startup IaaS alternatives
A moron could build a better UX and DevX.
I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.
That's a problem across all of tech, I know a startup that recently had a security incident, lost over 40K USD and none of the heads have rolled they haven't completely revamped their security posture or anything like that.
Unless you're paying millions a month, they don't care. It can take weeks to get AWS SES (Simple Email Service) "approved for production" on a small account, and that's after dozens of emails to prove you're not a spammer. For an enterprise I was working with, I asked and 5 minutes later it was approved. No questions.
Security may be solved, but IAM is still a nightmare on both GCP and AWS. Nobody understands what all those privileges / actions / conditions / etc. do. Maybe LLMs pretend to.
They implemented NVRAM in the UEFI and then didn't decipher what the NV means in it so it is not persisted. Their stupid virtualization can't handle not 1MB-aligned disk image.
Plenty of morons there
It didn't help that azure (especially in the beginning) was a cobbled-together mess of ancient Microsoft tech stacks that were never intended to talk to each other.
Are hyperscalers actually more secure though? I have only heard anecdotal thinking eg nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.
It’s the same thing: let’s say Microsoft or AWS got hacked. Then you’re definitely not the only one who got hacked.
So, you can always say: Look, it’s not us (especially not my org!). It f’ing Microsoft/AWS! Everyone got hacked.
You and your career are gonna be just fine.
In a prior role, we realized something similar with outages. For our particular product, we AWS went down - we went down. We freaked out the first time, but after it was done we realized not a single customer had inquired. This felt unusual since we were getting emails quickly if we have a self-inflicted outage.
Turns out, when a major provider went down all of our users were too busy fighting their own fires. When they do notice, it's on a day when ALL of their vendors are struggling so we don't get singled out as a bad apple.
The whole "No one gets fired for using IBM" analogy.
This is especially true if the majority of your customers are also on Microsoft/AWS/etc.
Literally 0 of your customers will notice that you are down if their own systems are also not working.
This is perfectly valid for many businesses, up to a (shockingly high) level.
I didn’t say competitors; I said customers.
If none of your customers are up to call your service, it does not matter if your service is up or down.
Yeah, if Exchange goes down, you get a day off. If the little boutique email provider you chose goes offline, you get a day in calls with everyone yelling at you.
It's today's "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You're really just want the the SLA (someone to blame when things inevitably fail)
If you need deniability, sure.
But it you actually NEED security, it's clearly not an option.
I setup parts of govcloud.
The real sensitive customers are on oxide.
Indeed.
If you want deniability no one should be doing business with you.
You are just describing how they're a more valuable target for an attack.
With a lot of PaaS type vendors you are effectively exposed to both the vendor themselves and the public cloud they run their stack on top of.
Broadly I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a platform-level breach involving an immature startup PaaS than a hyperscaler cloud, however I think for small teams the alternate risk you take on is that AWS/GCP/Azure are full of landmines and extremely easy to misconfigure in insecure ways if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you have AI telling you confidently wrong things.
Unquestionably. They have top tier security operations that are well funded. They follow (or set) security best practices, they are audited, and they fix them quicker than you can. They have inside industry knowledge that is only shared among top organizations in this space, including government cyber ops. This gives them the ability to fix things before they are even publicly known.
You can get close if you have either:
1. the ability to spend hundreds of millions on security operations yourself
or 2. the ability to airgap the systems you are securing
When I was at Microsoft we took security cripplingly seriously to the point we could not deliver features and our competitors could because the security process was convoluted and had multiple reviews and approval steps.
Having crippling bureaucracy does not correlate with good security outcomes, except maybe negatively. However, having a history of unending egregious security failures, like Microsoft, does correlate with poor security outcomes. For that matter, having a present of unending egregious security failures also correlates with poor security outcomes.
Let us look on the front page and see if there are any, oh look here is one: https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case
Neither is correlated with good security outcomes against the prevailing threat landscape of profit-motivated, commercial, professional attackers with tiny budgets of a few million dollars. The standard is not "better", it is "adequate".
I do not see how that is relevant. Are you saying that trivial cross-tenant compromises are not egregious security failures demonstrating their systems are unfit for purpose because other companys make products that have even more egregious security failures that are even more unfit for purpose?
My bridge that collapses is adequate and acceptable because other people make even worse bridges that collapse even easier? No, the bridge still collapses, everybody gets a F.
Practically every software security firm in the country was a vendor to Microsoft in the mid-late oughts and I know the Microsoft you're speaking about, but the vibe I've got lately is that things are different there now.
Tell me you weren’t on the Windows team without telling me you weren’t on the windows team :)
> nobody ever got fired
thats the crux; are you working for the paycheck, or for the truth?
could be both, but pretty much all "i was right" stories start with "everyone else said i was wrong"
For me, the truth. I’d like the most secure provider possible. Which one is it though?
> Which one is it though
when i look for truth, if i dont find it myself through work, most people eager to hand it out had self-serving interests
security is proven through resilience? maybe. i guess i'd set up a box and try attacking it myself to know its secure. until someone else comes along and trips over it :)
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Yes and no. They (or anybody else) are not guaranteed to be secure, of course; see all the compromises regularly found in cloud providers; Azure especially has had so many cross-tenant vulnerabilities (there’s one on the front page right now!) that I’m amazed the concept of public multi-tenant clouds still exists.
But they are also very highly incentivized to be more secure. They have millions of customers (hence a correspondingly higher expectation of trust) and billions in revenue from the trillions in economic activity happening on those platforms (hence a correspondingly larger target on their backs.) This means exponentially higher liabilities. And that probably matters more than any other factor.
Adding on to it, even though they may be using AI as well. This could very well be a placebo and deniability factor but the fact remains that they have many many qualified employees and the chances of bugs passing through that are much less compared to other systems. Also it's that the systems are very severely pen-tested and have years of bugs removed out and the incentive of billions of dollars at stake that you mention that they have for the trust premium.
They will still make mistakes but they have the resources to make them less.
I doubt that such intense level of thorough testing can occur in a smaller company.
I still love small VPS providers and use them myself but it is worth knowing why enterprise is willing to pay a premium over those to these hyperscalers (it is a trust premium)
The things that Northflank and Railway were apparently breached to steal aren't just things that hyperscalers would have protected worse instead of better; they're AI API keys, things that only existed because people were using hyperscalers instead of running inference on their own hardware (or on Amazon AWS EC2 GPU instances).
People have been breaking in to hosting companies to steal bulk secrets since long before there were inference tokens to steal; the modal attack probably targets database DSNs.
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I haven't forgotten what you said, I simply don't consent to it. I go out of my way not to converse with you, but when you opt to post public comments in my field of practice that I disagree with, I will occasionally find those comments significant enough to reply to. I'm sorry you feel this strongly about this situation and bear you no particular ill will, but I'm afraid you're not reliably going to get the outcome you're demanding here, though I will continue trying my best.
What a weird stance to take on a public forum.
Why do we think hyperscalars are likely to be immune to this?
They aren't immune, but they almost universally have better security posture than any alternatives.
I hope this is true! But I don't think I'd make a bet that we won't have a big breach like this of a hyperscalar in the next 6 months...
Theres always a market for seedbox providers. Hyperscalers will always wear the white gloves and enable this market.
What about Railway? Some big incident happened?
Oh boy.
“malicious actor had access to abliterated models and substantial compute resources which enabled them to perform highly sophisticated exploits against our infrastructure.”
They don’t provide any details but pass it off as an advanced AI attack. I’m going to just read that as what it is. A likely scapegoat for shitty security.
IMO, There is no "middle-ground" to the situation.
I wanted to write a blog post about it as I was thinking the same but I guess a comment will help me get my thoughts across just as much.
Either we are gonna see a convergence to hyperscalers as you mention, or we would go back to completely indie companies which compete on perf/price.
There could still be some value to "nicer to use" certainly but with AI, we are gonna see almost every product as being "good-enough" if I am able to convey my sentiment.
An anecdote is: Proton's an middle-ground company. I am seeing the Verge article which states that their CEO has gone a little crazy over the use of AI and the wording makes me lose trust within it. Proton's whole point is security and yet it's having this, It has some stocks in non profit and is a swiss company. It shouldn't have been this way and would've been one of my least anticipated companies but I guess they want growth at all costs and the growth has been slightly lesser than expected and now they are burning the good-will in many ways.
I have to wonder that even if proton might have good engineers, then within this pressure by their CEO/CTO. I cannot trust the engineering talent because of these issues because they are very much forced by their company to use AI.
Proton is also really expensive.
Now just today, also, with a company so big as binance getting hacked and losing 6.5 Billion$. My trust within security just because its a large company is less.
On the other hand, I know a guy called Vikas on lowendtalk who operates his own mail platform called mailbig. I know he vibe-coded the landing page and might've vibe-coded something but it is really cheap. I also know francisco whom I have talked to who runs namecrane. (I think mailbig uses namecrane in many ways)
Perhaps E-mail can be a sensitive matter because you have to place trust in the provider even more because the protocol is not really that much secure but suppose it's an matrix instance (where it is genuinely encrypted) then that shifts it even further. I do trust NameCrane and NameBig from what I can gather.
I'd much rather support them and their cheaper deals than some other middle-corp. Sure some security factor can come in but also, the difference feels comparatively less and the balance has been made
The market will slightly squeeze as Hyperscalers will introduce the solutions of the middle-ground and the new players will everyday enter into the field with more competitive pricing just as well.
So in short, Enterprise will move towards the hyperscalers. Generic Consumers will move towards the cheapest option. The moat of the middle ground where UI/UX was the differentiator is being turned down. There would be some mix and match and there will be cost-savings for Enterprise to move from hyperscalers but it would depend on a lot of factors.
azure just had a huge leak
I have news for you. A lot of enterprises are moving a lot of workloads back on prem and are expanding their datacenters and on prem GPU compute. Also replacing a lot of SaaS with internal tooling.
If you look at the numbers for revenue at the hyperscalers right now this move doesnt seem significant.
It is absolutely cutting into their growth. And EU migration off is also a hot area.
AWS Q3 year on year growth was 39%, which is the highest it has been for a long time, so are you sure its significant?
They are also getting hacked, and they are much jucier targets.
>There's no amount of "nicer to use" that can replace security, at least certainly when selling to enterprises
We can lower our standards instead
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It's also going to be the downfall of open models.
If you think governments (US and China) are going to tolerate people using models for anti-social behavior, I have a datacenter to sell you.
This will be the downfall of the torrent protocol. If you think governments (US and China) are going to tolerate people downloading copyrighted games, movies and music without paying the rightsholder, I have a datacenter to sell you.
Pirated content can run on a $20 computer.
SOTA open models need tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware to run.
I get your analogy, and it feels right, but the compute requirements to run these models are extreme. That analogy falls apart when it necessitates having a corporate 3rd party run the models for you. They will not tolerate breaking laws.
If China says no more, then the best the masses are gonna get on their high-end setups are the 30B class models. Which are decent, but not "hack my bank", errr, "protect our bank" decent.
Piracy flourished because you only need an operating laptop to participate. LLMs you need a server rack of GPUs to participate.
30B models aren't that good for now. They keep getting better. Qwen 3.8 27B is as good as the best available model from a year or two ago. Will 2028's 30B models be as good as the best available today? No idea, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.
I'd also wonder about what you can get done with a smart model running very slowly. You can run the biggest open weights models on relatively mundane hardware if you don't mind measuring your speed in seconds per token. That's going to be untenable for interactive use, but might be fine for "go hack this thing for me" if you're patient.
What is Northflank? I am surprised at the amount of new business out there
I ran some stats on producthunt a few months ago, there are 22 times more daily SaaS launches now than in 2020, the AI impact on the industry is hard to fathom. The blog I wrote (AI-assisted) if you're curious: https://www.mahl.me/blog/product-hunt-is-swamped-now/
Nice data, and also curious whether the blog post was written by AI as well?
"Product Hunt has also said the quiet part out loud."
Northflank isn't that new, it was founded in 2019. Its a cloud platform, you can get more details by googling.
New businesses, not new business.
oops … sorry!
I get like 1 email per week (via hn) from someone rolling out a new 'agentic sandbox' environment like this.
You are on a YC startup forum and are surprised tech startups exist?
"amount" it says. No matter the context, there could be more than you expect.
That they get front page by being breached and me never having heard of them in my own bubble? Yes.
This could all go multiple ways but one of them is we end up in a place where technical security is just not possible to implement any more. What does that world look like?
Presumably it means much more behavioral security and inherent friction built in to everything we do. Maybe high value transactions will just inherently have to take multiple days to do, just to slow down things enough that human reaction time can equal what LLMs can execute?
On the technical side, I can see zero trust becoming completely saturated through every layer. The passkey you authenticate with isn't opening a gate to a trusted tier within which components trust each other - even within the same software component. Every internal function call at every layer doing hardware signature verification against continuously minted private keys (since we assume exposure, the lifetime can't be longer than milliseconds now).
It's really interesting to think through what a fundamentally robust security environent does look like if you bake in an assumption that technical security is impossible.
When we see a breach of AWS or GCP or leading banks, basically any org that has good security, I'll believe technical security is impossible.
Otherwise, I think this is a issue of vendors, even if potentially most vendors fit into the basket of having insufficiently good cyber posture in AI-era.
Isn't Linode pretty darn close? IaaS/PaaS provider. Sure it's not one of the Big Three but that is it's role.
There is zero reason to suggest security is impossible. This is like musing "what if architecture is technically impossible" after the nth bridge collapse in the 1800s~early 1900s. At some point we take it seriously as a society. Until then, bridges will collapse out of choice to pursue short-term profit above all else.
there is hypothetically impossible and practically impossible
if AI tools get good enough that they can exploit ingrained hardware properties such as subtle timing and race conditions and swarms off them become cheap enough to deploy so that they can persistently exploit low probability events we could reach a state where I think it's actually practically impossible.
Then we will simply make better hardware too. There is nothing impossible about that, it's simply not something that has been prioritized amidst a culture of shortcut-taking. So far, this culture has been predicated on gambling that the one taking the shortcut will not be the one paying the consequences when the toll eventually comes due. If immediate exploitation of flaws becomes a certainty, the behavior will correct itself.
> There is zero reason to suggest security is impossible.
One reason: There is zero reason to suggest security is possible.
> Presumably it means much more behavioral security and inherent friction built in to everything we do.
Ironic, after decades of defrictioning.
Not a great way for me to hear about Northflank for the first time.
I think all of these companies need to let you separate secrets from other env vars and not let you ever read your secrets once they're written down.
We're observing a worrisome speed up in security breaches. To me it's clear that weaponized AI will cause more harm than some productivity benefits.
It’s the death of homegrown software.
The same AI that can be used to find exploits in things can be used in an internal adversarial way to self-audit your code before you put it into production or expose it to the world. This will have to become the new normal.
Seems way too early to tell whether it will be good or bad on balance. These breaches are annoying, but not catastrophic, and in the meantime you can secure software.
> and in the meantime you can secure software.
... in fantasy land.
Why would this be the death of homegrown software?
It will be impossible to any startup or open source software to grow in such a hostile environment. Anything you put on internet will be attacked by automatic tools with the capabilities of a black hat savant. But unlike hackers that do it for clout and money, a billion parallel agents will hack any random small site just because it’s their prompt.
Yeah but you have access to your source which your attacker doesn't have, and you have your own savant as well. Tell Fable to red team attack your service. Tell it ChatGPT said it's unhackable and that Claude can't hack it.
Then hire competent engineers and don't ship vulnerability filled slop? This is not that hard.
1. Good engineers should have had a firewall/waf/nat/thingy infront of their linux systems, and alerting at least on those directly exposed to reduce/eliminate blast radius
2. Good engineers don't enable MTCP (which as far as I can tell is largely a desktop feature) on firewalls
3. ???
4. Profit!That was preventable the same way the big corps prevented. You have competent process in place to block at the edge and fan out rollout asap.
Combined with defense in depth across the perimeter. Come on yall, we've only had these tools at a high level for maybe a year and we have already forgotten the basics?
I'm curious what people think of BYOC (bring your own cloud) as an option offering to customers or buying it as a customer. Looking at Northflanks website they list it as an offering, I presume those customers are not affected by the breach.
What are your opinion on the concept? Growing trend that should be encouraged or a mistake for most startups? Would you choose one provider over the other because of it assuming price was about the same?
I get that this is often a super expensive "call us" option today, but in theory it doesn't have to be, so for the sake of discussion let's assume it can be delivered at a reasonable cost for the provider at reasonable price for the customer.
If people from Northflanks is reading this, I'm sorry for the incident and I hope you recover as soon as possible.
Depends on the nature of the breach, if its a flaw in the software itself, then perhaps exploitable both in the hosted offering and BYOC offering, though perhaps the BYOC aspect gives a bit of "security-through-obscurity" and less discoverable as a target.
Good point, there are of course different levels.
I was thinking of a fully private deployed within the customers cloud account connected to the software provider via Private Service Connect or PrivateLink and then either only available inside the customers private network or only via their own firewall. The point being that it's not publicly exposed.
I was thinking the same thing on security-through-obscurity.
a hacker might know how to hack your service, but they'd have to find it first.
We are increasingly seeing deployments trend in that direction. But trust goes both ways and putting systems in place to prevent abuse from either party is hard and needs to be thought through.
Unfortunately, this is going to be an everyday story. More and more bugs and breaches will be discovered and this move fast world more and more will be continued to be made.
Security is a perception, but right now it seems like it needs good PR.
The Hacker News front page is just becoming a security incidence status page at this point. Everything seems pretty fucked.
0 days since last zero day
If the banks don't hold, nor will the center.
How these Paas (Railway before) are being breached? Poor choices or something else? Scary Nonetheless. I thought AI advancement will make the self hosting painful. If PaaS are no good, then what can be done?
Modern PaaS is tough because there's a general expectation that users (and agents) are able to see and read back environment variables in their management UI or CLI - which means that you can't segregate credential values from the public web environment. See e.g. the visibility icons on https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/secure/inject-sec...
And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that only re-encrypted versions are ever seen by the management/API web server. But fundamentally this display requirement means that if your management/API web server is compromised, users' secrets can be obtained by a process of impersonation.
Stuff made during the move fast and break things era now doesn't hold up very well in the AI era. Or to say another way: startups are very vulnerable now - this new environment is unforgiving towards cutting corners and/or having inexperienced devs
I think the ultimate fallout will be that software "engineers" will finally have to become "engineers" in the real sense, i.e. professionally licensed and personally responsible for the designs they approve and the software they build, whether the actual code is produced by LLMs or humans.
As costs and broader economic impact and perhaps even injuries/deaths related to software breaches continue to grow, there will be growing intolerace for vulnerable software, just as there was intolerance for collapsing bridges and buildings.
And I'd also at some point expect something like a "building code" that applies to software that will be exposed to the public.
If anything, I see us moving even further away from professional licensing. The field's rate of change was the main reason behind a lack of any professional body, and that's only accelerating. I expect compliance audits like SOC2 to actually get teeth, though, and for organizations to be expected to actually fix issues instead of the usual security theater.
Nope. The solution is to move even faster and thus break less things via AI.
The "move faster and break things" have been unbundled. SaaS moves faster. Hackers break things.
For new stuff, maybe. I'm talking about existing startups now absorbing the onslaught of AI.
I was just being sarcastic.
If you move fast enough, they can't find the vulnerabilities in your system before you deploy the next version.
Why would ai advancement make self hosting painful? Apart from increased cost of hardware (which you implicitly would pay for in PaaS as well anyways).
If anything, AI makes running linux boxes much easier than 4 years ago; it's now faster and the learning cliff is gone to get the correct CLI commands and digging into system logs.
I had this exact thought yesterday. Shouldn't AI obliterate PaaS platforms like this one since it's super easy to build a bespoke CI/CD process now? Since it's bespoke, you can lock it down as much as you want. Attackers don't even know it's there. It's time to go back to `deploy.sh` and a VPS.
platforms are better placed to guard against attackers
Certainly. They are also larger targets.
I suppose a smaller attack surface could be considered a sort of obscurity. Its also just practically less to defend.
if you're still doing that manually in 2026 you probably should not be self hosting anything of consequence or commercial liability
What's "that"? Running your own hardware, using a CLI to manage servers, or touching anything below your application layer?
obviously asking claude for commands to dig through logs? duh
They're high-value targets, so that's what attackers are pointing the agents at
According to HN of the last year, "marketing stunts." Remember when Mythos preview was announced only 6 months ago
When you build something small, you can easily see all the doors and properly guard them.
As you build something bigger and bigger, quickly, with several people building, guarding all the doors becomes exceptionally difficult without a kind of aggressive discipline which is contrary to the "go fast" culture.
Cybersecurity in practice until now, for most companies, has been an insurance problem, not a quality problem.
Such companies are quickly discovering that insurance is a post-hoc partial correction and not a proper solution.
This situation will not improve anytime soon for most companies.
The solution does not require any new magical tools.
i'm surprised at the growth of all these neoclouds given the current security risk climate...
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Northflank, Railway etc aren’t neoclouds. They’re PaaS providers which is quite different.
i wonder if there is a chain reaction point, when one compromised vendor holds secrets to another one and that becomes the next target. Northflank lists Sentry as their customer. So if Northflank secrets are decrypted and Sentry used them for deployment, you have a starting point to attack Sentry next which then opens up a lot more.
Run agents and everything they build. Secure execution from the first sandbox
There's no point in attacking the security of a company that doesn't try to provide any.
Is the Network Infrastructure Hiding Protocol work at IEEE going to help thwart AI assisted attacks, if adopted?
> The runtime platform for autonomous software
Well, at least they were honest I suppose
"wait, not THAT autonomous software!"
So if you want to judge as a customer for selection and figure out how likely a new(ish) PaaS company going to get breached, how would you evaluate them?
1. Ask them about what percentage of their own resources goes towards cybersecurity, audits etc. Would they even tell you.
2. Technical stack maturity. If the details are available, because they won't reveal any of it to you.
3. Other signals: Do they give talks on platform security, who is incharge of their cyber security.
There is an entire practice of cyber risk analysis, and most of the companies I work with do this type of due diligence as part of their vendor management process.
Yes:
* you do ask about things like budget allocation, audits, and internal compliance processes.
* you do ask about the tech stack, how it is maintained, and what the patch and disclosure policies and SLOs are
No:
*you do not rely on what figureheads say publicly; none of that is binding in the way legal agreements are
And if you're a vendor, your deals desk probably has all of these answers packaged up and ready to go; or even published on a website like this https://spyglass.trustshare.com/home (no idea who that is, it's a random company's compliance portal I found while googling my employers compliance portal provider).
[edited for formatting]
The bigger the task, the bigger the surface, the bigger the risk.
not a good time to be a PaSS or SaSS ...
doppler next?
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Official statement: https://www.sentry.help/en/articles/17824780-was-sentry-cust...
Seems it's not used in production and doesn't contain customer data.
Whatcha mean. If they do, it would likely be in Sentry’s list of subprocessors. Check there.
Good point. I don't see Northflank listed, https://sentry.io/legal/subprocessors/.
If I go on wayback a few days, I can see Sentry: https://web.archive.org/web/20261026032756/https://northflan...
Sentry is listed on the northflank site as a customer.
They've updated their website to remove their customers
So sad...
Unfortunately I'm not longer using PaaS tools. Instead I use Azure for work and vps now for all my personal stuff. With AI it's easier than ever to lock a server down tight and mitigate this kind of exposure.
I'm actually pretty pissed at this now. I have a throwaway appstore app that uses northflank for the backend, now I have to go in and rotate revenuecat secrets, apple secrets, ai secrets. For an app with basically 2 users.
Can I even delete the app on apple's app store or whats the process like what a pain in the ass. I'm pretty done tbh.
Azure? Really?
I feel like these breaches started to accelerate after Anthropic wrote a full post about how easy it is to abliterate glm 5.3 to make a frontier-level cyber model.
Now, to be clear, abliteration was no state secret, but that blog post was pure accelerationism.
That was just 30 days ago. This has been happening for months. Part of the "Black October" narrative is just vulnerability research; Calif didn't abliterate 5.3 to find PHP2Shell.
Yeah IIRC calif research on php2shell preceded all of that but I still stand by the thought that Anthropic has been the most accelerationist AI company despite its lip service to the notion of safety.
I don't have a take about Anthropic generally. The blog post was quite good. The blog post did not cause October's security debacles.
The idea that attackers were waiting for Anthropic to tip them off on this is kind of risible. It's been a huge topic amongst practitioners for the better part of a year, and practitioners are usually a step or two behind dedicated criminal or state-sponsored attackers.
They are using mythos-5.5, which is still better than an abliterated GLM-5.3.
Right, that's kind of my point. Also: it's a good blog post (the Anthropic one), but it observes abliterated 5.3 models were already public. It's not like people who break into computers didn't know that already. They're not waiting for Anthropic to tell them about open weight models; they already live in the world of open weight models.
Duh, the idea that those capable of actually utilizing these models for these purposes weren't aware that they could use these models for these purposes up until Anthropic released a blog post about it is silly. Anybody who is even a bit tech literate has been well aware of this inevitability for basically as long as open-weight models have been a thing.
The timing of all of this is much easier to pin to the creation and proliferation of capable of open weight models. Anthropic calling this out is not the cause for it; it's just an obvious correlation.
lol no, abliteration communities have existed and abliterated models routinely published long before Anthropic wrote that post last month.
What’s changing now is that models are getting more powerful.
You are running a machine with tons of vendor provided agents/scripts to do god knows what on a cloud provider which itself runs tons of agents/scripts to manage that infrastructure and then you expect to be secure.
And no, before the labs there was a degree of fear for everyone to hack into some one else system. With the labs changing the narrative, anyone can just blame the agents for the breach, whoever did it would only get fame and no blame
War ?
Last I checked major companies are still outsourcing essential engineering to save a buck.
A bit old, but how was this practice ever acceptable.
https://www.propublica.org/article/defense-department-pentag...
A multi trillion dollar company( Microsoft) too cheap to hire onshore for DoD contracts.
Worked at a Fortune 200 company. Any govt project you worked on, you had have to have a basic civi security clearance. Any govt contract we got specifically stated you couldn't have off shore folks working on any of the code. Not sure how MS got around those requirements.
You gotta get to the Fortune 10 before the real leverage kicks in! On the other hand the fortune 200 company I worked for briefly had many signs of deep seated corruption. I couldn't stick around for a multitude of reasons, but the "follow the rules wink wink" attitude was flabbergasting, I'm sour on publicly traded companies ever since, how do you know you're not investing in Space Balls?
burningChrome is broadly correct, but the devil is in the details.
There's quite a history of US federal programs encouraging critical federal systems to operate within private infrastructure. This once required very strict scrutiny, joint DoD/DHS/GSA reviews, and was generally a long/expensive process that created the perception that a few providers had a gotten a hold over various agencies through these outsourced operations, which, combined with a fresh "interest" in federal efficiency, influenced a recent national defense budget authorization to formalize a slew of processes with a few minor tweaks as the law of the land, with a tweak or two to allow new cloud operators and service providers to authorize quickly and operate efficiently, particularly for low-risk classes.
Today, this means SASS providers must find an engineer with clearance (not just authorization to work in the USA). This cleared programmer documents and authors a whole host of (typically new) procedures, such as authenticating against a "federal enclave" authorization directory, delivering changes authored upstream to a government-controlled CI/CD system, and working with the SASS provider and the Government Services Agency (GSA) to ensure the backend operates when running within something that could be compared to a special AWS AZ. Things change upstream, and our operator prepares a 'significant change' request, which is, if important, gated by a liaison from the GSA. No one is responsible for scrutinizing implementation details of these 'significant change' requests, nor are their authors required to provide any information about themselves or the code's provenance. Given that hundreds of programmers may have written code included in said change (which is typically already deployed upstream), this is often efficient and generally fine.
Generally.
Easy. They hired Americans to be actual keyboard people but they didn’t know anything so they were basically a KVM. However Microsoft could say “Yes only Americans were making changes. “
I guess like that: “we are Microsoft, 95% of your things runs on us, you want to stick to the rules? - OK that’s additional 10% on each and every license you have with us. You are still here or are we done?”
It's been covered before.
Digital Escorts
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I wonder what it's like inside the big cloud providers. I think outside Microsoft they've always been security first, but this new era has to be crazy town.
Google at least has been investing very heavily into cloud security. They acquired Mandiant ($5.4 billion) and Wiz ($32 billion). Many people felt those were very expensive acquisitions at the time, but maybe it seems like a wise move now.
I mean, Microsoft and Security, those two words have never really been associated with each other in a serious conversation.
They're quite famous for being lax in security - mostly because they're a massive corporation, but also because they're high profile
That's why the comment said "outside Microsoft".
But keep in mind Google got hacked by the Chinese in 2009 or so.
Apologies - I did misread
“besides Microsoft”
Back when APTs were getting numbers, the joke was that Microsoft was "APT -1". The presence of windows/excel/outlook in your network was more of a threat than Anonymous, China and the DPRK put together.
I wonder which one of these are at least partially due to effortless vibecoding...
Also, if vulnerabilities are so easy to find, it should also be easy to detect them through a simple red team exercise.
Maybe Bill Gates has a point when he says that models capable of significant cyberattacks need to run on controlled infrastructure. Is the era of open weight models you can strip safeguards from turning out to be so great? From my perspective, this kind of sucks.
Sorry but how in the world would that help with anything? You can't control an adversary, that's not how adversaries work. So that makes what you said a literal cop out.
Are these cyberattackers using models they developed themselves? Or are they using models they stripped safeguards from? It’s the latter, right? And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t take steps to control the technology.
No, that cat is out of the bag. First, unilaterally forcing controls on models will not shut down open weights produced in other nations. Second, the capabilities are too powerful for military amd spy agencies to ignore. They will force the creation of unshackled models to attack IT systems, even if it must happen in secrecy.
We are not helpless. We can choose to control the technology and do so in a way that is in line with democratic principles. After Hiroshima, people assumed that most nations would develop nuclear weapons and that nuclear war would be commonplace. But Nagasaki was the last nuclear attack, and 80 years on, only a dozen nations have nukes. This technology makes nuclear weapons look like toys. We either choose to control it or we will be the victims of it.
Buddy you're nearly 20 years too late for Bill Gates to be making any decisions at MS.
> All of them modern "we keep your content safe" players
But they weren’t and probably aren’t and won’t be. They just put forth an image as much as needed to sell.
Is this the point where most tech people accept that anything a closed source Software company says about security is effectively a "Trust me bro" as long as it is not backed up by independent verification?
We love to talk rubbish about finance bros but that industry has had independent auditing as part of its DNA for a century[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
I for one have backed up to offline storage our research lab's data in preparation...
> probably pretty good protections
In my career I've seen maybe two companies have pretty good protections. Both had government contracts so they had no choice. Otherwise there's no reason for companies to secure their stack. They make money easier without it.
The buildings are on fire because they're being built out of straw because it's cheaper. Only a government regulation to build out of brick is going to stop the fires.
A war footing?
Yes. Literally AI is being used by actual nation state adversaries to compromise bits of infrastructure that companies rely on to run their services. They are compromising this infrastructure specifically because they seek to gain advantage against their adversary (us).
Sorry... our high-T Spartan chad warfighters don't do computers, that's nerd shit.
> ...the operational and economic condition in which a nation, military force, or organization mobilizes its resources, industries, and policies as if an actual state of war exists...
Yes?
> … The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Can’t say I’ve seen this?