Here's my update to the broader community about the ongoing incident investigation. I want to give you the rundown of the situation directly.
A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called
Context.ai that he was using. The details are being fully investigated.
Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleagueβs compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments.
Vercel stores all customer environment variables fully encrypted at rest. We have numerous defense-in-depth mechanisms to protect core systems and customer data. We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as βnon-sensitiveβ. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration.
We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.
At the moment, we believe the number of customers with security impact to be quite limited. Weβve reached out with utmost priority to the ones we have concerns about. All of our focus right now is on investigation, communication to customers, enhancement of security measures, and sanitization of our environments. Weβve deployed extensive protection measures and monitoring. Weβve analyzed our supply chain, ensuring Next.js, Turbopack, and our many open source projects remain safe for our community.
The recommendation for all Vercel customers is to follow the Security Bulletin closely (
vercel.com/kb/bulletin/verceβ¦). My advice to everyone is to follow the best practices of security response: secret rotation, monitoring access to your Vercel environments and linked services, and ensuring the proper use of the sensitive env variables feature.
In response to this, and to aid in the improvement of all of our customersβ security postures, weβve already rolled out new capabilities in the dashboard, including an overview page of environment variables, and a better user interface for sensitive env var creation and management. As always, Iβm totally open to your feedback.
Weβre working with elite cybersecurity firms, industry peers, and law enforcement. Weβve reached out to Context to assist in understanding the full scale of the incident, in an effort to protect other organizations and the broader internet. I also want to thank the Google Mandiant team for their active engagement and assistance.
Itβs my mission to turn this attack into the most formidable security response imaginable. Itβs always been a top priority for me. Vercel employs some of the most dedicated security researchers and security-minded engineers in the world. I commit to keeping you updated and rolling out extensive improvements and defenses so you, our customers and community, can have the peace of mind that Vercel always has your back.