Railway urges all users to revoke secret keys after cyberattack

Development platform Railway has confirmed that a cyberattack allowed hackers to access some customer secrets, prompting the company to urge all users to rotate their API and cloud keys amid fears of a broader breach of customer data.

The company, which lets customers build apps and services on its cloud development platform, said in a blog post on Wednesday that the unidentified hackers “may have accessed encrypted environment variables and, for some of them, obtained the decrypted contents.”

These environment variables are typically lists of passwords and API keys that a developer's apps use to access other services, such as cloud data storage and databases. With these customer secrets, an attacker could also log in and access data as if they were the rightful owner.

Railway said that while its initial analysis suggests the breach was limited to a “subset of users,” it recommended that “all users” revoke and rotate all of their keys so that attackers cannot abuse them.

The company also said it paused customer deployments while it investigates, effectively freezing customer websites and apps.

Railway did not say how many specific users were affected or what the root cause of the incident was. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident, or about whether it has received any correspondence from the hackers, such as a ransom demand.

It's unclear how the attack occurred or which Railway systems were compromised. Railway said the breach was likely part of a broader attack targeting platforms “with the aim of compromising AI inference providers.” These kinds of attacks involve tricking AI systems into leaking sensitive data through malicious prompts beyond their guardrails.

The latest breach comes soon after U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA warned that China-based AI companies are conducting large-scale attacks on U.S. companies with the aim of improving their own models.

Earlier this week, open source AI coding tool OpenCode said customer secrets had been breached in a similar attack, with hackers taking more than 1% of its customers' API keys and other secrets. OpenCode attributed the attack to an AI distillation attack, in which large numbers of agents seek to extract sensitive information from AI models.

The Railway attack appears to be separate from two critical security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed in the PHP web programming language this week, prompting companies and governments around the world to pull down their websites to fix the vulnerability before attackers could exploit it. (PHP is used in some 70% of websites and public-facing internet systems.)

Patches for the bug, dubbed “PHP2Shell,” were publicly released on Wednesday, following a globally coordinated effort to let big organizations fix their systems ahead of possible attacks. Security researchers at Amazon said they found evidence of exploitation four days before the patch releases, suggesting that the bugs are now being used in attacks.