And it’s all just getting started imo.
”An external incident response firm reviewed PingCAP’s production systems and found no evidence that the attacker ran commands or maintained persistent access in the systems reviewed”
hmm, I don't think that's true.
Subtract costs for employees. Which, given current economy and inflation, that gets you a founder scraping on their savings, one or two other people (remember that if you're paying someone unless it's totally offshored through a house which has it's own inflation, you have other factors) and then your own taxes... yeah... much more than that and you are in the black.
As a general factor I keep in mind, when I worked at a 'normal' but toxic place before I was an actual software engineer, my manager's rules were something like '40 percent L2R' (might have been lower) for in-house employees and 70- 80% L2R for contractors.
IOW, for every dollar billed for an actual employee, we paid the employee 40 cents. For every dollar billed for a contractor, we paid them 70-80 cents.
I've heard similar figures from others (e.x. 'in house employee has a real cost of 1.5-2x their actual pay').
And yes it sucks and yes the structure at least here in the US is a factor.
I dont understand using any PaaS that essentially functions by arbitraging aws to people that are scared of an aws dashboard at a 3x markup.
Seems like a decent platform for toy projects not for enterprise.
tripadvisor and bilt, maybe?
It's pretty common to have "toy" infrastructure in a non-tech business
I'm just going to say it, since having said it non-stop for over 20 years, nobody seems to listen and we keep circling this drain.
The 12 Factor manifesto was 100% wrong on this point.
Use environment variables to point to where secrets are located, not to store their values.
Now your apps need to be able to read the secret that is pointed to, as opposed to the task runner populating the secret and the app would not know about the details.Not to mention the changes it entails to development.
I'm not sure I get the difference - the issue I would have thought was having the system code have access to the secrets themselves? Env file vs env vars injected at runtime seems the same there - either can be exfiltrated. The difference would be having it injected when used.
Is the problem with files about what happens outside that, being committed, etc?
The headline here is that there's no reason to believe "environment variables" were the reason this data was breached; presumably, the database those variables came from was what actually got hit.
Fwiw it sounds similar to the hack over the weekend that opencode suffered.
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.
Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.
The actual solution largely involves the same technologies but in reverse: leveraging AI for live security monitoring, better correctness validation and security testing before code goes live, etc. And of course more pressure to use battle-tested widely-adopted libraries and systems, even though of course that comes with its own tradeoffs.
Importantly, as an engineer, when someone tells you something has liabilities or tradeoffs, the response is not "Everything is a liability, existing is a liability"; that is unprofessional. The appropriate response is to engage with them on these tradeoffs and working through the best ones, because that's your job. Otherwise defer to security engineers who are ready to back up their arguments. It could be as simple as following up with, "But do you think those liabilities outweigh the benefits of hot patching without proper review? What are some of the main liabilities you see, and what methods/technologies do you think properly address them?"
B2C? too risky to publish services online haha.
LAN cables will go up in price soon.
One medium-sized server can now easily serve the entire banking system of a large country. So you don't need clusters of servers with careful tradeoffs between consistency and availability because of the CAP theorem.
Just get a big honking host, slap Postres on it, and run your application server in a VM on the same host. For backup, export the WAL logs from Postgres onto your favorite off-site blob storage. UI for it? There's Pigsty.
It still makes sense to host this in a cloud provider, just because you probably don't want to deal with actual hardware. And maybe get a second standby server for redundancy.
That's it.
You'll need a bunch of external dependencies for email, 2FA, observability, LLMs, and so on. But they should all be outgoing dependencies that should not allow access back into your system.
Do you think you can hit these load levels? For compute, a 64-core CPU can saturate a 10G network with simple template rendering. If the code is written in something reasonably fast (Go, Rust, Java).
Of course, if you're on a scale of Amazon or Stripe, you'll need more than that.
Sometimes I do miss owning the hardware to run a thing.
What I don't miss was having all of those appliances run a different base distro of Linux, each with varying levels of update support, while the security team keeps reading security scans to me.
We have gotten a lot of comments about why didn't we just message the breach sooner when people have noticed compromise with their accounts. I think that crit is fair and justified, and although we have been up for days on end- I don't blame you if you don't have sympathy for us.
Our thought process was that we didn't want to recommend that people roll keys when we couldn't possibly confirm that we confidently plugged the breach and rolled the mitigation(s). I am comfortable to publicly say that this was a highly motivated attacker. Meanwhile, our threat team mitigates DDoSes, CVEs, while been patching everything immediately as dealt with exploits.
As for this breach in particular, we tried to balance a duty to warn, which we take very seriously... However, it took a significant amount of time on the order of hours to verify, reviewing, and keep up with the attacker as they attempted to move laterally around, and briefly, within the system. We didn't want message anything beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were no further exploit paths.
We take the view that we would like to "aviate, navigate, then communicate" when we deal with incidents like these then we prepared communications to the public and all users. While it was ongoing, we were in contact with external partners and vendors to revoke keys (the source of some online chatter) with investigators that required time and coordination.
On the incident side of the house, it's a suite of bad options, we're still in the middle of it making sure customers are safe. But, hopefully this offers a view into our thought process.
Formal postmortem after we fully restore service and complete the investigation. Apologies to all, I personally I feel like I let everyone down.
Audit Logs
Oct 21, 2026 05:54:13 PM CDT
BucketInstanceCredential.regenerated in my-project production by Railway Staff
Oct 21, 2026 05:54:13 PM CDT
BucketInstanceCredential.regenerated in my-project production by Railway Staff
Oct 21, 2026 05:54:13 PM CDT
BucketInstanceCredential.regenerated in my-project production by Railway StaffThe 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.
I think this, the supply chain attacks and binary reverse engineering will cause us to go back to thin clients, html over the wire and vibe coded libs instead of external open source deps.
In the near to medium term, the current open source regime has issues because bugs have become extremely discoverable and easy to exploit. But I am skeptical that obscurity will provide vibe coded deps sufficient protection over the long term. As soon as the source code for those vibe-coded deps leaks, you are screwed.
The value of 'code written before 2024' is going to be substantially higher than of code written afterwards.
Sort of like a 'low background steel', a comparison someone made on HN before which I think was pretty good.
I don't have experience with proof based tools, so I'm not sure what's feasible.
I can imagine prompting an LLM to build provably correct software. Aren't we already doing something similar already when we remind it to write unit tests and account for all edge cases?
Actually writing provably correct software from scratch sounds terribly tedious, which is why I've never explored it. But maybe an LLM could make that task more approachable.
It gave me something which looked pretty legit. Of course, the generated output very likely to be subtly wrong, but as starting input to a formal checked specification/proof process it seemed like a good start.
I wrote some UTF-8 based string handling software back in the day. It doesn't seem unreasonable to write up a set of requirements and edge cases and then have a formal mechanism prove correctness for common UTF-8 string manipulation operations.
[PEAK HN ON] Now if we could just write provably correct exception handling, we could solve one of the two PHP vulns from today. [PEAK HN OFF]
I should check it against my email address validator that would be a nice benchmark. It's interesting that there are people that are using email addresses that are not actually valid according to the standard.
We can have an LLM enumerate all those edge cases, and we can assemble them into a spec. Then we can integrate that spec into a proof.
And because the spec is functional rather than expressive, we can produce copyright-free, provably correct reference implementations whose correctness is as strong as our spec and our proof process.
This reference implementation would then be available for use by a language like PHP, or perhaps an LLM generating a vibe-coded dependency.
Over time, then, the accumulation of such proven reference works grows. We'll never prove all the application code out there correct, but incremental progress is possible.
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.
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.
Then you have real security incidents that you need to tune into constantly.
Like did someone vibe code too hard, how do env secrets leak for everyone...
the speed of irresponsible deployments is infinite now, by design
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.
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.
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.
Or did I miss something?
However, from discussions with partners, it resembled the pattern of attacks to secure AI API tokens and credentials. Preliminary forensics tell us that this was the primary goal of their attack. That said, I want to be careful here commenting until we have our formal public post-mortem.
What is the best VPS to use today? Is it still hetzner or ovh?
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.
Is that an accusation? As in, major AI players taking out competitors ?
AI makes this so much easier to do now, we should all own our own code, and deployment infrastructure (use a cloud instead of someone wrapping aws for you)
You do have an argument to be made about vendoring our dependencies, or removing them in general. Not a bad idea