Vercel said the fallout from an attack on its internal systems hit more customers than previously known, as ongoing analysis uncovered additional evidence of compromise.
The company, which makes tools and hosts cloud infrastructure for developers, maintains a “small number” of accounts were impacted, but it has yet to share a number or range of known incidents linked to the attack. Vercel created and maintains Next.js, a platform supporting AI agents that’s downloaded more than 9 million times per week, and other popular open-source projects.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said the company and partners have analyzed nearly a petabyte of logs across the Vercel network and API, and learned malicious activity targeting the company and its customers extends beyond an initial attack that originated at Context.ai.
“Threat intel points to the distribution of malware to computers in search of valuable tokens like keys to Vercel accounts and other providers,” Rauch said in a post on X.
“Once the attacker gets ahold of those keys, our logs show a repeated pattern: rapid and comprehensive API usage, with a focus on enumeration of non-sensitive environment variables,” he added.
The attack exemplifies the widespread and compounded risk posed by interconnected systems that rely on OAuth tokens, trusted relationships and overly privileged permissions linking multiple services together.
“The real vulnerability was trust, not technology,” Munish Walther-Puri, head of critical digital infrastructure at TPO Group, told CyberScoop. “OAuth turned a productivity app into a backdoor. Every AI tool an employee connects to their work account is now a potential attack surface.”
An attacker traversed Vercel’s internal systems to steal and decrypt customer data, including environment variables it stored, posing significant downstream risk.
The company insists the breach originated at Context.ai, a third-party AI tool used by one of its employees. Researchers at Hudson Rock previously said the seeds of that attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments.
Vercel has not specified the systems and customers data compromised, nor has it described the threat eradicated or contained. The company said it’s found no evidence of tampering across the software packages it publishes, concluding “we believe the supply chain remains safe.”
The company fueled further intrigue in its updated security bulletin, noting that it also identified a separate “small number of customers” that were compromised in attacks unrelated to the breach of its systems.
“These compromises do not appear to have originated on Vercel systems,” the company said. “This activity does not appear to be a continuation or expansion of the April incident, nor does it appear to be evidence of an earlier Vercel security incident.”
It’s unclear how Vercel became aware of those attacks and why it’s disclosing them publicly.
Vercel declined to answer questions, and Mandiant, which is running incident response and an investigation into the attack, referred questions back to Vercel.
Vercel has not attributed the breach to any named threat group or described the attackers’ objectives.
An online persona identifying themselves as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases. Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the attacker is “likely an imposter,” but emphasized the risk of exposure is real.
Walther-Puri warned that the downstream blast radius from the attack on its systems remains undefined. “Stolen API keys and source code snippets from internal views are potentially keys to customer production environments,” he said.
The stolen data attackers claim to have “sounds almost boring … but it’s infrastructure intelligence,” Walther-Puri added. “The right environment variable doesn’t just unlock a system — it lets adversaries become that system, silently, from the inside.”
The post Vercel attack fallout expands to more customers and third-party systems appeared first on CyberScoop.
–
Read More – CyberScoop
