alt Hacker NewsHi Angelo from Railway here. This is very much me. https://x.com/ngeloxyz/status/2113077263386239309?s=20
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.
Replies
"aviate, navigate, then communicate" only matters if you are the one in control of outcomes.
Customers could have simply revoked keys and not re-launched services with rolled credentials (that from your post, may have been re-stolen), but instead you let this fester.
What a disaster for Railway. I hope you get through this stressful moment, but this should be the end of Railway.
IMO "aviate, navigate, then communicate" does not work in this situation. There is more than one pilot. The moment you detected a breach, hell, even knowing that an attacker was inside your system, you should have pointed to anyone. Hell, even AI, to draft a disclosure with more info coming.
> and although we have been up for days on end- I don't blame you if you don't have sympathy for us.
From my timezone, this started last night and is ongoing into today. Has this been going for longer than the status page and email indicated? If so, why was notification delayed so long?
I love your product, have an incredible amount of sympathy for you as humans (having been in similar sleep-consuming nightmares) and was willing to forgive the GCP-triggered outage as an understandable teething pain, but sadly this response has really knocked my confidence.
I understand the hard reality of security issues -- "urgently rotate your keys, they're already compromised" is an important message to share -- but "sorry, that will also require your site going down because we've blocked deploys" (presumably as a response to the incident...) is an incredibly frustrating situation to find ourselves in.