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Comment by ryanscio | Hacker News Reader

https://x.com/rauchg/status/2045995362499076169

> A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called http://Context.ai that he was using.

> Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleague’s compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments.

> We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as “non-sensitive”. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration.

> We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.

Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.

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> We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.

Blame it on AI ... trust me... it would have never happened if it wasn't for AI.

> We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI.

Reads like the script of a hacker scene in CSI. "Quick, their mainframe is adapting faster than I can hack it. They must have a backdoor using AI gifs. Bleep bleep".

> Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.

On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.

But on the other hand... It's Sunday. Unless you're tuned-in to social media over the weekend, your main provider could be undergoing a meltdown while you are completely unaware. Many higher-up folks check company email over the weekend, but if they're traveling or relaxing, social media might be the furthest thing from their mind. It really bites that this is the only way to get critical information.

> the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.

They can be brought in to do their job on a Sunday for an event of this relevance. They can always take next Friday off or something.

Has anyone actually gotten an email from Vercel confirming their secrets were accessed? Right now we're all operating under the hope (?) that since we haven't (yet?) gotten an email, we're not completely hosed.

Hope-based security should not be a thing. Did you rotate your secrets? Did you audit your platform for weird access patterns? Don’t sit waiting for that vercel email.

Of course rotated. But we don't even know when the secrets were stolen vs we were told, so we're missing a ton of info needed to _fully_ triage.

> Did you rotate your secrets?

For most secrets they are under your control so, sure, go ahead and rotate them, allowing the old version to continue being used in parallel with the new version for 30 minutes or so.

For other secrets, rotation involves getting a new secret from some upstream provider and having some services (users of that secret) fail while the secret they have in cache expires.

For example, if your secret is a Stripe key; generating a new key should invalidate the old one (not too sure, I don't use Stripe), at which point the services with the cached secret will fail until the expiry.

nope...I feel u, the "Hope-based security" is exactly what Vercel is forcing on its users right now by prioritizing social media over direct notification.

If the attacker is moving with "surprising velocity," every hour of delay on an email blast is another hour the attacker has to use those potentially stolen secrets against downstream infrastructure. Using Twitter/X as a primary disclosure channel for a "sophisticated" breach is amateur hour. If legal is the bottleneck for a mass email during an active compromise, then your incident response plan is fundamentally broken.

> On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams

This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.

And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.

If he's not one to defer to Comms or legal, maybe this one is so bad that he's acting differently then he normally would

I'm going down with the ship over on X.com the Everything App. There's a parcel of very important tech people that are running some playbook where posting to X.com is sufficient enough to be unimpeachable on communication, despite its rather beleaguered state and traffic.

Usually, companies have procedures for such events. But most do not.

Usually have procedures, but most don't? Say again

The disaster plan says there is a process, but it has never been used and is probably outdated. Chances are the social media strategy requires posting on the Facebook and updating key Circles on Google+

Yes, they say we have backup procedures, but have they ever tested that the backups work? They write procedures to please auditors:)

> the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams

Wouldn't the CEO be... you know... the chief executive?

Sure, and the reason he is is because he DOES check stuff like this before sending it out.

Top leaders excel because they assemble a team around them they trust. You can't do everything yourself, you need to delegate. And having people in those positions also means you shouldn't be acting alone or those people will not stick around

I disagree. In a crisis, a leader should take the lead and make decisions. If he/she is not able to that on their own, they are in the wrong place.

Now I will agree that there are many executives like the ones you describe. But they are not top leaders.

So you’re telling me a CEO must also be a practicing lawyer? Because any other option is how you guarantee your company gets sued into oblivion.

First of all, I would expect a top leader to be prepared for scenarios like this (including templates of customer communication).

And yeah, I would expect a CEO to have enough legal knowledge to handle such a situation (customer communication) on his own.

But I also have to mentioned that I'm not in the US. Not every country has the litigation system of the US where you can basically destroy a company because you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself.

> you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself

presuming you're referring to the hot coffee lawsuit, maybe read details of the story. McDonalds wasn't at all blameless, and the plaintiff had reasonable demands

You expect the CEO of a company to have the legal depth of knowledge AND knowledge of all their customers, contracts and SLAs to be able to wing a communication and not somehow trip over all of that? They also should understand every possible legal jurisdiction that could be affected? You realise even the head of their legal department (a HIGHLY competent lawyer) likely wouldn’t say there could do that without speaking to the key people in their team?

Should the CEO also bang out some dev estimates for the roadmap because, hey, they should be competent enough to do something like that. Why not submit the accounts for the year? How hard can it be, just reading a few lines off their Sage or Quickbooks accounts?

Let me be more clear on what I mean by “wing it,” because “having templates” doesn’t really cut it. Anyone can bang out a “we have a problem” template, so why does the CEO need to attach their name to it? Once you’re at the point of needing a CEO to communicate, you have a specific problem, with its own specific impacts that a single person can not be expected to have enough depth of knowledge in their brain to actually talk about without involving their domain experts, including legal, technical, whatever the situation needs.

> can not be expected to have enough depth of knowledge in their brain to actually talk about

What is the use of a CEO if not to have enough depth of knowledge about the different aspects of running a business?

Like what? Poor little CEO that doesn't understand anything about the world and how to run a company. Seems like helplessness is expected at every stage.

> What is the use of a CEO if not to have enough depth of knowledge about the different aspects of running a business?

Bit of a difference between “having depth of knowledge in their business” and “can speak off-the-cuff with the necessary accuracy to remain in compliance with every contract and legal jurisdiction their organisation is engaged in, without consulting the numerous domain experts they employ for just this purpose,” isn’t there.

Also, such a situation that requires the CEO’s direct attention has already gone FAR beyond your standard incidents where you can throw out a pre written statement. Do you want your organisation just cuffing it from the top down? Are you Elon Musk in disguise?

What use is a CEO if they can't take the lead in times like this?

If they are unprepared frankly they suck as CEO and should be thrown out. If only competency was a requirement for these jobs...

That’s not what I said though, is it?

Take the lead couldn't be more different than act by themselves.

Take the lead, yes they should be able to as that's the job pretty much.

Act by themselves, sure they can make decisions in small cases. But on big things you hear everybody's input, weigh it, and only if needed, cast the deciding vote.

Production network control plane must be completely isolated from the internet with a separate computer for each. The design I like best is admins have dedicated admin workstations that only ever connect to the admin network, corporate workstations, and you only ever connect to the internet from ephemeral VMs connected via RDP or similar protocol.

> an AI platform customer called http://Context.ai that he was using

Hmm? Who is the customer in this relationship? Is Vercel using a service provided by Context.ai which is hosted on Vercel?

Surprising velocity? It appears the hackers had the oauth key for a month.

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