Northflank Breached
status.northflank.com432 points by js4ever 19 hours ago
432 points by js4ever 19 hours ago
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.
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?”
Step 1. Find code on GitHub.
Step 2. Copy it into your repo. Who cares what the license says, how would the authors of that code ever see it being misused, because the place it is being misused requires a security clearance?
Step 3. Deliver the code as yours.
Truly, how will the people who authored something on GitHub ever know? Any circumstance you describe would require someone without clearance to know implementation details of some software. Which is to say, either the thing I describe happens all the time, or security clearances are overblown.
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.
Those are standalone products and professional services, not internals they use
A problem is some people and teams are world class at a big company... But not everyone, everywhere. For a fun time, read about the rollout and internals of Azure.
This sounds really interesting — have any links you wouldn't mind sharing?
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.
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.
> 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.
It would seem Google account details have been compromised or otherwise correlated, with not a peep from Google, we are getting reports of scam calls to people's real phone numbers about the "business opportunity" available in their attached Youtube properties.
Another possibility is advertising shadow profiles are able to correlate logged in accounts across YouTube and other properties.
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 am unclear why you linked to a 20yo law that was enacted a few years before we found that the entire sector was floating on loans to people with fake information.
Should startups that have experienced a data breach face a lower valuation in subsequent funding rounds?
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.
> 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.
I for one have backed up to offline storage our research lab's data in preparation...
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?
> SaaS-shaped
The usage of shape here triggers me.
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.
No. The Chinese have already developed frontier models. And we would be fools to assume that's a permanent end to the list. North Korea has nuclear weapons. Iran has ballistic missiles and leading edge military drones. There is no fundamental reason why both countries shouldn't be able to train frontier AI models.
Trying to protect ourselves by putting restrictions on the technology would be like trying to hide from a tiger by wrapping a towel around our heads on the basis that if we can't see it then it can't see us. That trick only works on imaginary monsters, not real ones.
You should assume any of those are possible. And by that I mean: it's not physically possible to "control the technology" without instituting total surveillance and even that's just false security.
Defense is the only way.
You don't realize it, I imagine, but you're essentially advocating for the contemporary equivalent of requiring a license to print text on paper and distribute it.
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.
I feel like this is quite a different situation. Building a nuclear weapon requires a lot of things to happen in the physical world that we can watch for. Weapons grade fissile materials must be sourced or refined, facilities must be build, you can't just do this in any machine shop. Various experts must be either poached or subverted or home grown. There are a lot of people with mouths involved. Then once you get past all of that you either have to test or just hope for the best at which point you will certainly be detected and likely handled with extreme prejudice.
Digital intelligence seems much less controllable. Near frontier weights are already out there, you don't necessarily need massive datacenters if you're not trying to serve commercially. Even if we we're somehow able to control what OTHER nations do through either treaties or threats of sanctions/force, working on this stuff is easily in range of many of the larger criminal orgs. Beyond all of that, there's always the chance that weights from authorized providers find their way "out the back door".
We've seen with crypto and darknet markets that even if you can fight this kind of stuff and catch bad actors, the most actual change you're going to effect is a temporary slowdown and the next guy who tries is going to be that much better. I don't doubt that regulation is going to be the initial route this goes, mostly due to the financial interests of the frontier companies and the desire to keep this build-out solvent for as long as possible rather than any true concern for actual safety and sanity. What's really going to need to happen though, in my very insignificant opinion of course, is we are going to have to change from the ground up how our digital infrastructure is built.
Maybe with the coming changes that is for the best too, our current systems are designed for people and I don't know the current numbers but it seems like agent traffic is already the bigger percentage. We may not be able to build our infrastructure on top of these large mountains of human designed legacy code. Maybe we need to be thinking about new kernels, new servers, new protocols and stacks.
We seem to be very quickly reaching a point where is something is not mathematically provable to be secure then it is not secure at all.
This is much more akin to books than it is to nuclear weapons. In my view you're proposing to tightly control access to something akin to the next generation of books. Is knowledge power? Yes it is and it's much more dangerous concentrated than distributed.
Buddy you're nearly 20 years too late for Bill Gates to be making any decisions at MS.
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.
Until there's a exploit for Palo Alto, Juniper, Cisco, F5, <pick your defender>.
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. ;-)
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.
Or there's some exploit in an endpoint device, and the problem moves laterally from inside your firewall.
It's also harder to explain to your customers why you're the only product they use that has a security problem when an exploit does eventually happen.
You see this already with uptime. If Github or AWS has a major outage, it's in the news and even people that don't understand software realize it's just "something happening today, everything is down".
And, unfortunately, in practice customers don't care about this inverse, when "everyone else is down but not that one product".
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.
Until the attacker bypasses your perimeter firewall by convincing an employee to download and install malware.
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.
Having employees (or system like bastion hosts) with unrestricted access is one of the recurring mistakes in such events. I can’t understand it.
Zero Trust is expensive to implement and the business people hear "at the end, the systems will ideally work as good as before".
It will take a few bankruptcies until security is taken seriously.
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.
In-person requests for access to any app. Request interview includes word association exercise that monitors your emotional reaction to a string of key words.
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.
LLM discovers exploit -- you don't realize it in time because you don't have a security team as big as the PaaS you used to use -- you get pwned anyway.
This has happened to many high-profile self-hosted pieces of software just this past month.
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?
There have been a lot of exploits for a lot of software on-prem tech stacks rely on just over the past month - proxmox, php, nodejs, palo alto, eMudhra, etc come to mind.
> But then, you're unlikely to be the top target of anything.
That would have protected you 3 years ago when a human had to bother to attack you. Today it doesn't protect you because it's trivial to deploy an LLM to act like an APT against any random target that shows up in shodan.
It takes more effort to secure on-prem software today than it did just a couple of years ago. Updates are more frequent, zero days are more frequent, attacks are more common, more persistent, and more automated.
I think most people responsible for securing production systems today will share the experience that their workload has increased.
You're still describing an environment that presents a pre-auth surface area beyond a listening port.
And I am literally a security engineer; the work has absolutely not gotten harder, it's just changing in how you think about security, just like it shifted before from "secure the perimeter" to "defense-in-depth", it's now changing again to focus on automated response and compartmentalization/ segmentation (and I mean real segmentation, not the checklist-style "we have 3 vlans, but they can all talk to each other" 'segmentation' you used to see.
Yeah, most organizations need to expose something to the internet as a matter of normal operations -- at least some sort of a web app if not dozens. It would be great if we could all just have udp 56820 listening silently for a key, but that isn't reasonable for most organizations that have normal users expecting normal applications.
Yes, everyone is rushing to implement zero-trust principles for real now. It's getting harder to trust that your public facing endpoints don't have vulnerabilities, and it's getting harder to trust that your internal software and endpoints haven't been compromised from within your pre-existing trust boundaries. A lot of the increased workload is due to patching up the existing security infrastructure, and on top of that, building out new solutions to better fit today's threat landscape.