Vercel April 2026 security incident

(vercel.com)

116 points | by colesantiago 1 hour ago

12 comments

  • jtreminio 56 minutes ago
    I'm on a macbook pro, Google Chrome 147.0.7727.56.

    Clicking the Vercel logo at the top left of the page hard crashes my Chrome app. Like, immediate crash.

    What an interesting bug.

    • burnte 7 minutes ago
      I'm running 147.0.7727.57 and this doesn't happen. Macbook Air M5. VERY interesting.
    • farnulfo 48 minutes ago
      Same hard crash on Chrome Windows 11
    • itaintmagic 41 minutes ago
      Do you have a chrome://crashes/ entry ?
  • gneray 49 minutes ago
    • rubiquity 17 minutes ago
      He doesn't work at Vercel but he is the type to never pass up any opportunity to chase clout.
      • threecheese 0 minutes ago
        Almost like that’s his job.

        Hey, I’m with you - I think social media needs to die specifically for this reason. I’m reminded of the term “snake oil” - it’s like the dawn of newspapers again.

  • adithyasrin 13 minutes ago
    We run on Vercel and I wonder if / how long before we're alerted about a leak. Quick look online suggests environment variables marked as sensitive are ok, but to which extent I wonder.
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 1 hour ago
    The lack of details makes me wonder how large this "subset" of users really is
  • MattIPv4 1 hour ago
    Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824426

    https://x.com/theo/status/2045862972342313374

    > I have reason to believe this is credible.

    https://x.com/theo/status/2045870216555499636

    > Env vars marked as sensitive are safe. Ones NOT marked as sensitive should be rolled out of precaution

    https://x.com/theo/status/2045871215705747965

    > Everything I know about this hack suggests it could happen to any host

    https://x.com/DiffeKey/status/2045813085408051670

    > Vercel has reportedly been breached by ShinyHunters.

    • otterley 8 minutes ago
      Who is this “theo” person and why are multiple people quoting him? He seems to have little to say that’s substantive at this point.
      • gordonhart 0 minutes ago
        He’s a tech influencer, probably getting quoted here because he has the biggest reach of people covering this so far.
      • MikeNotThePope 1 minute ago
        Theo Browne is a reasonably well known YouTuber & YC founder.

        https://t3.gg/

  • mikert89 39 minutes ago
    Much as I want to rip on vercel, its clear that ai is going to lead to mass security breaches. The attack surface is so large, and ai agents are working around the clock. This is a new normal. Open source software is going to change, companies wont be running random repos off github anymore
    • sph 5 minutes ago
      Your entire recent posting history is "software engineering is over, AI has won."

      What's your agenda here?

    • tcp_handshaker 11 minutes ago
      >> ai is going to lead to mass security breaches.

      Let that be the end of Microsoft. Was forced to use their shitty products for years, by corporate inertia and their free Teams and Azure licenses, first-dose-is-free, curse.

    • lijok 37 minutes ago
      ShinyHunters are a phishing group. What does this have to do with AI agents?
      • mikert89 35 minutes ago
        Run ai agents around the clock to do hyper targeted fishing
        • cj 23 minutes ago
          I feel like humans would be better at hyper targeting.

          AI agents have the benefit of working at scale, probably "better" used for mass targeting.

          • mikert89 6 minutes ago
            this like is saying email marketing is done better if you hand write every email. Thats true, but the hit rate is so low, that you are better off generating 1 million hyper personalized emails and firing them off into the ether
          • freedomben 15 minutes ago
            I disagree. Many humans are phishing in a different language than their native tongue, and LLMs are way better at sounding legit/professional than many of them. The best spear-phishing will still be humans, but AI definitely raises the bar.
  • neom 1 hour ago
    https://x.com/theo/status/2045871215705747965 - "Everything I know about this hack suggests it could happen to any host"

    He also suggests in another post that Linear and GitHub could also be pwned?

    Either way, hugops to all the SRE/DevOps out there, seems like it's going to be a busy Sunday for many.

    • phillipcarter 21 minutes ago
      I don't know if I'd trust some random programmer-streamer-influencer on anything other than the topic of streamer-influencing.
      • hvb2 7 minutes ago
        The link at the top of the page it to vercel acknowledging it...
    • embedding-shape 49 minutes ago
      Based on what, "feels like it"? Claiming that Cloudflare is affected by the same hack has to come from somewhere, but where is that coming from?
      • gruez 44 minutes ago
        from his "sources".

        > Here’s what I’ve managed to get from my sources:

        >3. The method of compromise was likely used to hit multiple companies other than Vercel.

        https://x.com/theo/status/2045870216555499636

        To be fair journalists often do this too, eg. "[company] was breached, people within the company claim"

    • recursivegirth 7 minutes ago
      Ah, Theo with his vast insights and connections into everything. That man gets around, and his content is worth it's cost.

      Theo's content boils down to the same boring formula. 1. Whatever buzzword headline is trending at the time 2. Immediate sponsored ad that is supposed to make you sympathize with Theo cause he "vets" his sponsors. 3. The man makes you listen to a "that totally happened" story that he somehow always involved himself personally. 4. Man serves you up an ad for his t3.chat and how it's the greatest thing in the world and how he should be paid more for his infinite wisdom. 5. A rag on Claude or OpenAI (whichever is leading at the time) 6. 5-10 minutes of paraphrasing an article without critical thought or analysis on the video topic.

      I used to enjoy his content when he was still in his Ping era, but it's clear hes drunken the YT marketer kool-aid. I've moved on, his content gets recommend now and again, but I can't entertain his non-sense anymore.

      • neom 1 minute ago
        I don't watch his content, but I felt comfortable posting his link as I believe he's generally considered a reputable guy? His tweets sometimes come up in my for you tab and he seems reasonable and knowledgable generally? Maybe I'm wrong and shouldn't have linked to him as a source.
    • techpression 19 minutes ago
      ”Any host” of what? That’s such a non-descriptive statement and clearly not true at face value.
    • rvz 50 minutes ago
      I do remember that OpenAI did use Vercel a year ago. They might have likely moved off of it to something better.
  • ofabioroma 1 hour ago
    Time to ipo
  • rvz 51 minutes ago
    There is no serious reason to use Vercel, other than for those being locked into the NextJs ecosystem and demo projects.
  • 0xy 47 minutes ago
    This is why you pay a real provider for serious business needs, not an AWS reseller. Next.js is a fundamentally insecure framework, as server components are an anti-pattern full of magic leading to stuff like the below. Given their standards for framework security, it's not hard to believe their business' control plane is just as insecure (and probably built using the same insecure framework).

    Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.

    https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/rss/aws-2...

    • sbarre 23 minutes ago
      People say "Next.js is the new PHP" because it's the most popular and prominent tooling out there, and so by sheer number of available targets it's the one that comes up the most when things go wrong like this.

      But there are more people trying to secure this framework and the underlying tools than there would be on some obscure framework or something the average company built themselves.

      Also "pay a real provider", what does that mean? Are you again implying that the average company should be responsible for _more_ of their own security in their hosting stack, not less?

      Most companies have _zero_ security engineers.. Using a vertically-integrated hosting company like Vercel (or other similar companies, perhaps with different tech stacks - this opinion has nothing to do with Next or Node) is very likely their best and most secure option based on what they are able to invest in that area.

    • embedding-shape 42 minutes ago
      > Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.

      Wasn't unheard of back in the day, that you leaked things via PHP templates, like serializing and adding the whole user object including private details in a Twig template or whatever, it just happened the other way around kind of. This was before a fat frontend and thin backend was the prevalent architecture, many built their "frontends" from templates with just sprinkles of JavaScript back then.

  • jccx70 1 hour ago
    [dead]