SECURITY ALERT
No exploit was needed.
The password was the default.
Chainstack, a company that hosts blockchain nodes and RPC endpoints, the access points apps use to read and write to a chain, says an outside attacker reached a database of customer account information between 26 and 31 Oct.
That data may include organisation names, account holder names, team members’ email addresses and password hashes, according to the company’s incident report.
The intruder could also reach the systems that store customers’ node credentials. Chainstack says it has “no evidence they were read”. It is treating them as exposed anyway.
Nothing was changed on customer nodes, in the console or in the API, the company says. It does not store full card numbers, so those were not exposed.
The timeline
On 26 Oct the attacker got into a development environment. From 19:26 UTC they used a test Grafana dashboard, open to the internet with its default administrator login never changed, as a doorway into internal services.
At 21:01 UTC they reached an internal tool server built to let AI agents run Kubernetes commands. It asked for no login and had full administrator rights over the cluster.
On 29 Oct, with machine credentials taken from development, they reached parts of production. On 31 Oct, between 01:40 and 08:31 UTC, they read production secrets in bulk.
One of those secrets was a VPN key. When the attacker used it, the database network saw two clients with the same identity, and a replication job failed.
That failure started Chainstack’s investigation. The company cut the access paths the same day and closed the incident on 2 Nov.
Chainstack says it found no software vulnerability. Instead, the intruder strung together a default password, services with no login, permissions that were too broad and credentials that never expired. It says the attacker used an open-source framework that directs AI agents to automate intrusions, and that the incident was part of a wider AI-driven campaign reported in late October.
Exposed AI tooling has come up before this month: a flaw in the SGLang AI inference engine at NEAR AI exposed two customers’ API keys on 10 Nov.
The company added these technical details on 10 Nov. The Block reported the update on Thursday.
Which customers have rotated, and which are still running on credentials that sat on a breached system?
Protect yourself
- Rotate node credentials in the Chainstack console. The rotation replaces the endpoint auth token, username and password and gRPC x-token; old and new credentials both work until you deactivate the old set, so there is no downtime.
- Change your Chainstack password, and change it anywhere else you reused it.
- Regenerate platform API keys if you use the platform API.
- Treat unexpected “Chainstack” emails with suspicion. Chainstack says it never asks customers for passwords, tokens or keys. Attackers often follow a breach with lookalike messages, as in the fake Teams invite behind the SignalPlus breach.
Corrections and new evidence: [email protected]
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.