Gitbook Breached

We opened a ticket with support about Gitbook availability issues and got this in reply. We have yet to see any official customer communication or breach notification. Apologies for the formatting, did the best I could as it's a mobile paste.

Update:

GitBook security incident update Hey <$name>, The GitBook app, the GitBook API, and published docs are available again. A few services may still be degraded as we finish restoring everything to full performance.

*What happened* GitBook has been the target of a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents. At 19:00 CET, November 2, the attacker gained unauthorized access to some of our infrastructure credentials. We detected the attack immediately and acted swiftly to block further impact. To make sure our infrastructure was fully secure, we then took the GitBook app and authenticated docs sites offline. We kept publicly published content live for as long as possible, using cached data.

*What we did immediately* * Blocked the attacker and closed the vulnerabilities involved * Replaced every credential and secret across our infrastructure * Brought services back only once we were confident they were secure * Invalidated every customer’s API tokens on our platform

*Your data* Our investigation shows that the attacker may have accessed the following: * Git Sync secrets. * GitBook API tokens. * Third-party API tokens used to connect external tools to GitBook. * Questions asked to GitBook Assistant by your site visitors.

At this stage, we have found no evidence that any of your content in GitBook was modified.

*What you need to do now* * Rotate any existing GitBook API tokens. We revoked all personal API tokens during the incident. * Rotate any third-party API tokens or secrets you use to connect other tools to GitBook. * If you have published integrations that use secrets, rotate those secrets. * If you use the GitBook MCP server, re-authenticate it. Please contact your GitBook organization’s admin to assist with this process.

*What we are doing next* * Monitoring the situation in case of further attacks. * Introducing further security measures to our platform. * Writing a full post mortem that will be published soon with more detailed information about the incident. * If you have any further questions, please reach out to your account manager or our support team. You can also check status.gitbook.com for updates

Thank you for your patience, and we apologize again for the disruption The GitBook team

88 points | by punchmesan 2 hours ago

9 comments

  • SamyPesse 1 hour ago
    GitBook’s CTO here

    We have been dealing with a security attack since yesterday. Our team has been all hands on deck since the start, and we took a large portion of our services offline to prioritize user security.

    Our service is progressively coming back online (most of it already is), and we are actively monitoring the situation.

    We’ll continue to actively keep our users updated through emails, Slack, and our status page as we monitor the situation and learn more.

    • MrZander 7 minutes ago
      > GitBook has been the target of a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents

      Serious question: How do you know it was using AI agents? What logs distinguish it from a human?

      I see this claim a lot and while I don't doubt AI is being used for this, I have a hard time believing every breach has a smoking gun showing it to be an AI assisted attack.

    • xmcp123 19 minutes ago
      Nice to see someone not fucking up outreach during a security incident.

      Good work.

    • gkoberger 1 hour ago
      Good luck... this isn't easy, so best of luck to you and the team.
      • gk1 18 minutes ago
        Classy response.

        With the spate of attacks on infra providers over the past few weeks, it's been interesting to see how different competitors respond. The confidence some of the founders seem to have that they won't/can't be next is telling.

    • latchkey 1 hour ago
      After turning on 2FA, the page doesn't update to say it is turned on. It still has a configure button. Reloading the page fixes this.
  • FastDeep 21 minutes ago
    Good that they rotated all the tokens themselves instead of just telling users to do it, seen too many incidents where that step gets skipped.
  • petecooper 2 hours ago
  • altbdoor 1 hour ago
    Mentioned this 5h ago, but this post definitely fleshes out more details.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50351061

  • manytimesaway 2 hours ago
    FYI, Gitbook was made by the team behing friendco.de, which they killed without any announcement years ago.
    • SamyPesse 1 hour ago
      I’m genuinely sorry the end of friendco.de impacted you. It was 12-13 years ago; the service had little usage at the time, and we probably didn’t handle the end perfectly. I don’t recall exactly, but I can assure you that the team today is more experienced.
    • viccis 1 hour ago
      Not really relevant here.
  • aliasxneo 2 hours ago
    "GitBook has been the target of a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents."

    Add it to the list, I guess.

    • nsoam 1 hour ago
      Is this what they mean when they talk about accountability laundering?

      Oh, you see, we had the best security ever, but they used AI agents, and there's no defence for that, you can't secure a system against those spooky AI agents.

      • SamyPesse 53 minutes ago
        This is not what we meant. We will be accountable and will post a complete post-mortem. But it’s important to understand that the attack was a lot more developed than what we’ve been used to with humans, especially in terms of pace and adaptability.
  • punchmesan 2 hours ago
    Oof that formatting is rougher than I thought. Will try to clean it up after I'm done reconfiguring gitbook...
    • verdverm 2 hours ago
      new lines between bullets, only italics available, not markdown
  • philipwhiuk 2 hours ago
    This is the public disclosure: https://www.gitbookstatus.com/incidents/01M6FXDDGQRWHMYYWXY2...

    Note that the summary at the top of https://www.gitbookstatus.com at time of writing does not mention the unauthorized access and the incident details does not mention the contents disclosed above.

  • latchkey 1 hour ago
    One thing that would be appreciated are more details in these sorts of reports.

    "the attacker gained unauthorized access to some of our infrastructure credentials"

    How? Which infrastructure?

    • SamyPesse 58 minutes ago
      We’ll provide details in a long post-mortem. For now, it was important to notify our users as early as possible.