Railway Security Disclosure

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

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.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177413

Postiz founder posted on X that his service is being brought down, his keys were already used and Railway was quiet about this until he spoke up: https://x.com/wickedguro/status/2113015432974405658

Jeez, what a rough past 24 hours for all security folk. Hang in there

• jacquesm · 50 minutes ago

  It's going to be a rough decade.

  • rectang · 39 minutes ago

    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.

    • jacquesm · 9 minutes ago

      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.

  • cortesoft · 37 minutes ago

    It feels like the only solution is going to be proactively running your own AI agents looking for patches and applying them.

    • rectang · 31 minutes ago

      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.

    • jacquesm · 8 minutes ago

      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.

    • cyberpunk · 3 minutes ago

      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.

• merlindru · 11 minutes ago

  job security!

• llama052 · 10 minutes ago

  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.

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.

• barrrrald · 47 minutes ago

  This one doesn’t?

• arcanemachiner · 44 minutes ago

  > 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.

• gkoberger · 41 minutes ago

  Unless they edited the post, they never said this. You should delete this; it's false information.

• tokioyoyo · 35 minutes ago

  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.

• mbreese · 30 minutes ago

  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?

• nrmitchi · 9 minutes ago

  > 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.

Is this our new AI daily reality?

• iririririr · 38 minutes ago

  companies probably have php and Python applications exposed to the web and nobody knows. the speed of irresponsible deployments is infinite now, by design

Fuck, I thought this was about trains

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...

• 9cb14c1ec0 · 39 minutes ago

  Easy, all the bad guys need to do is access whatever system stores the decryption keys.

The past two days have been awful as someone who uses Railway.

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.

• reconnecting · 42 minutes ago

  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.

  • solyin · 37 minutes ago

    How does on-prem help if your product is a SaaS.

    • lawrenceduk · 24 minutes ago

      You open a SaaS shop where people come to use it

    • codeulike · 19 minutes ago

      Instead of being a SaaS it will need to just become a S

    • 80fj0348i · 19 minutes ago

      You put the SaaS into a Box your customers can install into their datacenter!

• yakz · 33 minutes ago

  It's only just starting. It'll get worse before it gets better.

• Fordec · 32 minutes ago

  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.

  • munificent · 29 minutes ago

    > hot patching will need to itself become fully automated. Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.

    • Fordec · 26 minutes ago

      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.

  • stabbles · 18 minutes ago

    Hot patching is itself a liability

• Sivart13 · 32 minutes ago

  surely once there's been enough patches the code will be perfect though?

• 0x1F8B · 10 minutes ago

  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.

Damn I guess all those l33t hiring practices were for nothing

• rvz · 30 minutes ago

  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.

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.

Do cloud providers have a lock-down mode where you can press 1 button and stop all spend?

• Aboutplants · 5 minutes ago

  Not a bad idea

Huh, I've been using Railway tonight and this was the first I've seen of this. Just got an email about it now too at 23:36

If you're on Railway do not wait, ROTATE every API key at the source, and do not set new values because Railway is still compromised and not secured.

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…

• jjulius · 8 minutes ago

  Prioritize your mental health, go enjoy your vacation.

How is it possible rotate keys if you disable deployments? You're basically telling us to take our services offline...

• tossstone · 15 minutes ago

  I've already taken my applications offline and will be migrating to a new host...

I’m lucky I moved away from it to host my own db with coolify

> Earlier this morning, Railway detected anomalous activity involving systems that store customer environment variables. ... Environment variables may contain secrets such as API keys or database and registry credentials. Can I ask why the *$@%@^T you would trust somebody else's server with this task? Has software engineering really gotten this lazy and stupid, or am I missing something about this being a good idea? I saw a tech-focused social media account advocate doing this, and I came close to coming after him in comments, but I decided not to; I figured this is just one of those things the kids are doing that I'll never understand.

Crazy day for cybersecurity: PHP RCE, eMudhra certificates, and now Railway. And it’s all just getting started imo.