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A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

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11–20 of 186 posts

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#11
post #5

This looks really really AI-generated even if the author did try to hide it by making some grammar elements improper. Idk if that diminishes it's accuracy though.

I don't know why you are downvoted. The article is AI blogspam, it doesn't have any more factual information than eg https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/vercel-empl... and is full of empty LLMisms. It's depressing people are willing to read this.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#12
I believe this is inaccurate. Vercel env vars are all encrypted at rest (on their side). The 'sensitive' checkbox means you can't retrieve the value once it's set, which would have saved your ass in this case. Also, annoying to read an article like this without a single link to source material.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#13
post #5

This looks really really AI-generated even if the author did try to hide it by making some grammar elements improper. Idk if that diminishes it's accuracy though.

I don't know why you are downvoted. The article is AI blogspam, it doesn't have any more factual information than eg https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/vercel-empl... and is full of empty LLMisms. It's depressing people are willing to read this.

I didn't notice till I saw this comment and now I'm also confident it's significantly AI written.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#14

> How many developers do you think knew that checkbox existed? How many assumed their database credentials and API keys were encrypted by default? If I don't see asterisks, I'm not hitting save on the field with a secret in it. Maybe they were setting them programmatically? They should definitely still be looking to pass some kind of a secret flag, though. This is a weird problem for a company like Vercel to have.

Do you ask a bridge engineer if they forgot to reinforce the supports when they built the bridge? Even when I didn't know about security this was a table stakes thing. People saving sensitive things in plaintext are upset that their poor practices came back to bite them. Now, at the risk of sounding like I'm victim blaming here, Vercel is also totally bearing some responsibility for this insanity. But come on. FAFO and all that.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#15
post #5

This looks really really AI-generated even if the author did try to hide it by making some grammar elements improper. Idk if that diminishes it's accuracy though.

I don't know why you are downvoted. The article is AI blogspam, it doesn't have any more factual information than eg https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/vercel-empl... and is full of empty LLMisms. It's depressing people are willing to read this.

Because a comment that just says it's AI generated provides no value to the readers. They could at least provide an alternative link like you did.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#16
I think this is wrong about what “sensitive” means here. AFAIK, all Vercel env cars are encrypted. The sensitive checkbox means that a develop looking at the env var can’t see what value is stored there. It’s a write-only value. Only the app can see it, via an env var (which obviously can’t be encrypted in such a way that the app can’t see it, otherwise it’d be worthless). If you don’t check that box, you can view the value in the project UI. That’s reasonable for most config values. Imagine “DEFAULT_TIME_ZONE” or such. There’s nothing gained from hiding it, and it’d be a pain in the ass come troubleshooting time.

So sensitive doesn’t mean encrypted. It means the UI doesn’t show the dev what value’s stored there after they’ve updated it. Not sensitive means it’s still visible. And again, I presume this is only a UI thing, and both kinds are stored encrypted in the backend.

I don’t work for Vercel, but I’ve use them a bit. I’m sure there are valid reasons to dislike them, but this specific bit looks like a strawman.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#17
According to the email I got from Vercel it was a limited subset of customers and I'm not one:

Initially, we identified a limited subset of customers whose Vercel credentials were compromised. We reached out to that subset and recommended that they rotate their credentials immediately.

At this time, we do not have reason to believe that your Vercel credentials or personal data have been compromised.

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#18

I think this is wrong about what “sensitive” means here. AFAIK, all Vercel env cars are encrypted. The sensitive checkbox means that a develop looking at the env var can’t see what value is stored there. It’s a write-only value. Only the app can see it, via an env var (which obviously can’t be encrypted in such a way that the app can’t see it, otherwise it’d be worthless). If you don’t check that box, you can view th…

[deleted]

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#19

I believe this is inaccurate. Vercel env vars are all encrypted at rest (on their side). The 'sensitive' checkbox means you can't retrieve the value once it's set, which would have saved your ass in this case. Also, annoying to read an article like this without a single link to source material.

I think it's clear that some customers env vars got exposed, so that can only mean unencrypted, right?

Re: A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

#20
post #6

Context.ai seems like it was the SPOF. By definition it has a lot of your data, and they didn’t secure it properly.

Clearly, Vercel should not have been compromised by this. I don't know who Context.ai is but I do know Vercel and I expected better from them. I also think we can expect to see a lot more stories like this.
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