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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to do the easy finger-pointing and scapegoating but honestly, what should happen to the Context.ai employee that thought it was a good idea to play games in their work machine and, on top of that, install cheats which are by definition of dubious provenance? I know defense in depth, security layers etc etc but there is also some personal responsibility at play here. We can chalk up the Vercel's employee mistake to a defense in depth failure that's on the whole company and management, but installing a cheat...

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Let’s just say that OpSec at companies adopting AI is low across the board because security just isn’t a deciding feature at the moment. See McDonalds breach 2 years ago

As somebody who tried selling cybersecurity software: Cyber-related OpSec is bad in most companies, AI or not. If effort and budget is allocated to it at all it's usually to a box-checking exercise that is about optics, liability and staying eligible for insurance payouts

Right, and adding the shifting sands of AI security just makes it worse. AI isn't a technology that's improving security.

Once Mythos is available to business customers, it should radically improve security across the entire web. Imagine if everyone was able to pipe their codebase through Mythos before deployment. We honestly may be on the verge of a bug-free internet.

good joob

Do we actually know the employee downloaded it on their work machine? At least this article doesn't say that (and I couldn't find it in other sources as well). Plenty of companies allow you to VPN into corporate network, or log into certain internal systems from the public Internet. Not saying they should, but it is much more common than you think.

For reference, look at how Disney got hacked. One employee downloaded compromised software on a personal computer. One thing led to another and boom. IT in many companies are much more incompetent than you think. I have seen that first hand.

Actually, you are right to question this. TFA mentions a MicroTrend report [1] as his source, but that report doesn't mention Roblox cheats and more interestingly says that Context.ai employee machine was compromised 22 months ago, in 2024! While TFA says February 2026. This details makes me doubt about the whole article

[1] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/26/d/vercel-breach...

TrendMicro, not MicroTrend ^^;;

It does mention "Roblox game exploit scripts" which is basically the same thing.

It might be the opposite - they logged into their work gmail account on their home machine to check their email.

I totally agree with your post.

> ... what should happen to the Context.ai employee that thought it was a good idea to play games in their work machine ...

And if we think just a tiny, tiny, bit about this the entire concept of a laptop that's both used at work and outside work for non-work related things is already quite a stretch.

I could name one company that is top 10 in market cap in the world where engineers had, on their desk (or below it), a work computer that was not connected to the Internet (but fully connected to an internal network) and a second computer, on another network, that was connected to the Internet. They may still have that setup today: don't know.

FWIW my main "workstation" (it doesn't have ECC memory and, weirdly enough, the actual workstation here is... a Proxmox server) doesn't even have sound.

No sound.

Ask yourself this: can you work without your main work computer even have the ability to emit any sound? For most people it's yes.

And I'm no luddite: countless NUCs, Pi's (got a tower of stacked Raspberry Pi's), laptops, etc.

But I don't need to watch Youtube vids on my main work computer. And I certainly don't need to play games on it.

Conf call? There are laptops for that.

Youtube vids? Just watched several from Clojure/Conj 2025 these last days. From one of the laptops.

The very idea that you game on the laptop that you bring to the coffee shop that you bring at work is what brought down Vercel. And shall take down many others.

That’s one among a dozen factors at play here. Yes that’s bad, but also the security of other systems should never depend on your work laptop never getting hacked or having spyware installed. If that’s the only defense, you’re going to have problems.

I know and understand, but still, if the claim is factually true - and now I'm doubting, that's basic security hygiene that everyone working in a software company should be required to know before getting hired.

I'd instead blame the IT department that let users install arbitrary software.

Or how it is possible to grant broad permissions to their Google workspace account. That doesn't happen where I work. Only a handful of approved applications can connect.

Right? This isn't "A Roblox cheat and an AI tool", this is a failure of basic basic basic opsec across two organisations.

One for which the Context.ai employee needs to have their arse booted up and down the car park for.

What about the context.ai security team?

You can blame individuals, but security is a property of the system.

It’s a very fine line. How do you check if people adhere to policies and at the same time don’t monitor them permanently?

Endpoint Detection and Response?

Heck, not giving the person Admin privileges would have sufficed to prevent this. Or better hiring preventing people who install Roblox cheats on work devices...

There is no excuse and no fine line here. Even outside them boasting about SOC 2 Type II, this would be embarrassing for an SME not in the tech sector.

OP was talking about the security team. Not sure what you are proposing?

Do you want to let any applicant be screened by the security team?

Any security team that gives unrestricted admin privileges to random employees is not a security team. So doing the most basic parts of their job, that would be my proposal.

If specific to my hiring comment, was meant a bit facetious, though I will point out this line in their "compliance" report by "auditor" Delve:

> The organization carries out background and/or reference checks on all new employees and contractors prior to joining in accordance with relevant laws, regulations and ethics. Management utilizes a pre-hire checklist to ensure the hiring manager has assessed the qualification of candidates to confirm they can perform the necessary job requirements.

Maybe those pre-hire checklists should include a question like "Are you a massive idiot, who'd install a game on their work computer, then on top of that be the type of idiot who likes to cheat, then on top of that be the type of idiot to install cheats on your work computer?", maybe that'd prevent this in the future. Or again, just don't give everyone Admin privileges...

I think one of us misunderstood how the event happened.

In my understanding restricting local admin rights would not have change anything here.

The Vercel employee signed up for Context.ai (a third-party tool) using their work account and granted it "Allow All" access to their environment.

Maybe Admin-Managed Consent would have helped prevent context.ai access the environment but this is not configured locally on the employee's machine.

It is a cloud-level setting managed within their identity provider's administrative portal.

Just an addition to the prior comment: To be as generous as possible, I just pulled their audit report [0] and to answer your question, all I propose is that they stick to this (especially the part on minimum permissions, any extended permissions need to be reasonable and reasoned for, etc), which they did not. The fault lies threefold:

First of all with the team members as Context.ai, that either weren't experienced or did not care enough to know that the "all green" they got from Delve straight away couldn't have been accurate.

Secondly, with the people at Delve who, at least in this isolated case, seem to not have fulfilled their obligations and are suspected to have done so in a consistent, repeated and intentionally malicious manner.

Third, the people who, despite claiming to have done their due diligence, being experienced investors and professionals in the field whose own prior companies also had to undergo audits in the past, looked at Delve and were willing to overlook the misdeeds for financial gain.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848077

The bootings will continue until the fuckups improve.

I doubt they had one. Context.ai got acquihired by OpenAI when it was still a very small company. I think they were winding down the original business, so it's unlikely that it grew after that.

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