YHK - yet another hacker news clone

90 points punchmesan 2 hours ago 24 comments

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

punchmesan 2 hours ago | parent

Oof that formatting is rougher than I thought. Will try to clean it up after I'm done reconfiguring gitbook...

verdverm 2 hours ago | parent

new lines between bullets, only italics available, not markdown

philipwhiuk 2 hours ago | parent

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.

petecooper 2 hours ago | parent

https://www.gitbook.com/status/security-incident-2026-11-03

philipwhiuk 1 hour ago | parent

It's bizarre they have both this and gitbookstatus.com and they contain different info.

SamyPesse 1 hour ago | parent

We summarized more information on this page from recent learnings, than what has been posted as updates on the status page (https://www.gitbookstatus.com/incidents/01M6FXDDGQRWHMYYWXY2...).

eddythompson80 47 minutes ago | parent

Does a security incident page really need to connect to 11 3rd party domains. smh

manytimesaway 2 hours ago | parent

FYI, Gitbook was made by the team behing friendco.de, which they killed without any announcement years ago.

SamyPesse 1 hour ago | parent

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 | parent

Not really relevant here.

aliasxneo 2 hours ago | parent

"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 | parent

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 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

SamyPesse 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gkoberger 1 hour ago | parent

Good luck... this isn't easy, so best of luck to you and the team.

gk1 21 minutes ago | parent

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 | parent

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.

xmcp123 22 minutes ago | parent

Nice to see someone not fucking up outreach during a security incident.

Good work.

MrZander 10 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

conartist6 1 minute ago | parent

Maybe there was a level-of-stupidity tip-off, like trying to break in and access something that's already public...

latchkey 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

altbdoor 1 hour ago | parent

Mentioned this 5h ago, but this post definitely fleshes out more details.

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

FastDeep 24 minutes ago | parent

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.