Threat watch / Breach
Northflank: customers told to assume every environment variable was decrypted
After a Wiz alert on 30 October, Northflank told all customers to assume their environment variables were decrypted and to rotate every secret. Users reported unauthorised use of AI API keys stored on the platform. Northflank has not yet published a root cause.
- Sector
- Tech & SaaS
- Way in
- Not public yet
- Product or vendor
- Northflank
- How it happened
- Northflank says evidence points to secrets held in its control plane, and that CVE-2026-98432 was patched across the fleet. It gives no technical detail and says the root cause is not yet disclosed.[1] Checked 8 Nov 2026
- What was stolen
- Customer secrets: Northflank tells customers to assume all environment variables are decrypted, including those in workloads, secret groups and global secrets. It dates the first known decryption between 02:39 and 03:08 UTC on 30 October. It says it has no evidence that customer workloads or workload data were accessed.[1] Checked 8 Nov 2026
- Who was impacted
- Users reported unauthorised use of AI API keys stored in Northflank. The number of customers is not disclosed. Customers on forward-deployed or dedicated control planes are listed as unaffected. Wiz places Northflank among the AI developer platforms with disclosed incidents in October, and describes two stolen Amazon Bedrock keys that ran about 800,000 and 1.7 million calls; it does not link those keys to Northflank.[1][2] Checked 8 Nov 2026
- Threat actor
- Not attributed
- CVE
- CVE-2026-98432
Timeline
- A Wiz threat alert arrives at 11:43 UTC. Northflank patches network policy within about 20 minutes and tells customers to rotate environment variables, then to assume all of them are decrypted. [1]
- Multiple users report that their AI keys were used. Wiz lists Northflank among nine AI developer platforms with incidents disclosed between 6 and 30 October. [1][2]
- Northflank enables audit logs for all customers, including free users, and adds secret rotation for more database add-ons. [1]
- Northflank says the attack vector was contained within an hour of the first alert and that it sees no sign the attacker stayed. Independent forensic auditors start a review. It revokes access tokens, sessions, VCS integrations and cross-account IAM roles where possible. [1]
- Northflank says the root cause analysis is still to come. [1]