logoalt Hacker News

alpineman • yesterday at 10:31 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Train wreck. People were writing on discord 3 hours ago, 10 hours after the incident started, that keys created just for railway were running up usage. Meanwhile builds have been down for more than 12 hours. Only NOW did they just send out an email to all customers. I wouldn't have found out until then if I wasn't checking the discord periodically.


Replies

ndneighbor • today at 1:29 AM

Hi 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.

➕ show 4 replies