I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.
Yes and no. They (or anybody else) are not guaranteed to be secure, of course; see all the compromises regularly found in cloud providers; Azure especially has had so many cross-tenant vulnerabilities (there’s one on the front page right now!) that I’m amazed the concept of public multi-tenant clouds still exists.
But they are also very highly incentivized to be more secure. They have millions of customers (hence a correspondingly higher expectation of trust) and billions in revenue from the trillions in economic activity happening on those platforms (hence a correspondingly larger target on their backs.) This means exponentially higher liabilities. And that probably matters more than any other factor.
With a lot of PaaS type vendors you are effectively exposed to both the vendor themselves and the public cloud they run their stack on top of.
Broadly I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a platform-level breach involving an immature startup PaaS than a hyperscaler cloud, however I think for small teams the alternate risk you take on is that AWS/GCP/Azure are full of landmines and extremely easy to misconfigure in insecure ways if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you have AI telling you confidently wrong things.
Yeah, if Exchange goes down, you get a day off. If the little boutique email provider you chose goes offline, you get a day in calls with everyone yelling at you.
When I was at Microsoft we took security cripplingly seriously to the point we could not deliver features and our competitors could because the security process was convoluted and had multiple reviews and approval steps.
Having crippling bureaucracy does not correlate with good security outcomes, except maybe negatively. However, having a history of unending egregious security failures, like Microsoft, does correlate with poor security outcomes. For that matter, having a present of unending egregious security failures also correlates with poor security outcomes.
Having crippling bureaucracy does have better correlation with security outcomes than the “move fast, break things” philosophy that most of the software industry lives by.
I’m not even blaming Zuck for that, he didn’t really invent it, though he certainly popularized it — he just made an astute observation of the dynamics in software and turned it into a company motto.
Neither is correlated with good security outcomes against the prevailing threat landscape of profit-motivated, commercial, professional attackers with tiny budgets of a few million dollars. The standard is not "better", it is "adequate".
I do not see how that is relevant. Are you saying that trivial cross-tenant compromises are not egregious security failures demonstrating their systems are unfit for purpose because other companys make products that have even more egregious security failures that are even more unfit for purpose?
My bridge that collapses is adequate and acceptable because other people make even worse bridges that collapse even easier? No, the bridge still collapses, everybody gets a F.
Practically every software security firm in the country was a vendor to Microsoft in the mid-late oughts and I know the Microsoft you're speaking about, but the vibe I've got lately is that things are different there now.
I feel like these breaches started to accelerate after Anthropic wrote a full post about how easy it is to abliterate glm 5.3 to make a frontier-level cyber model.
Now, to be clear, abliteration was no state secret, but that blog post was pure accelerationism.
You are running a machine with tons of vendor provided agents/scripts to do god knows what on a cloud provider which itself runs tons of agents/scripts to manage that infrastructure and then you expect to be secure.
And no, before the labs there was a degree of fear for everyone to hack into some one else system. With the labs changing the narrative, anyone can just blame the agents for the breach, whoever did it would only get fame and no blame
That was just 30 days ago. This has been happening for months. Part of the "Black October" narrative is just vulnerability research; Calif didn't abliterate 5.3 to find PHP2Shell.
Yeah IIRC calif research on php2shell preceded all of that but I still stand by the thought that Anthropic has been by far the most accelerationist AI company despite its lip service to the notion of safety and human dignity.
Right, that's kind of my point. Also: it's a good blog post (the Anthropic one), but it observes abliterated 5.3 models were already public. It's not like people who break into computers didn't know that already. They're not waiting for Anthropic to tell them about open weight models; they already live in the world of open weight models.
I ran some stats on producthunt a few months ago, there are 22 times more daily SaaS launches now than in 2020, the AI impact on the industry is hard to fathom. The blog I wrote (AI-assisted) if you're curious: https://www.mahl.me/blog/product-hunt-is-swamped-now/
How these Paas (Railway before) are being breached? Poor choices or something else? Scary Nonetheless. I thought AI advancement will make the self hosting painful. If PaaS are no good, then what can be done?
Modern PaaS is tough because there's a general expectation that users (and agents) are able to see and read back environment variables in their management UI or CLI - which means that you can't segregate credential values from the public web environment. See e.g. the visibility icons on https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/secure/inject-sec...
And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that only re-encrypted versions are ever seen by the management/API web server. But fundamentally this display requirement means that if your management/API web server is compromised, users' secrets can be obtained by a process of impersonation.
Why would ai advancement make self hosting painful? Apart from increased cost of hardware (which you implicitly would pay for in PaaS as well anyways).
If anything, AI makes running linux boxes much easier than 4 years ago; it's now faster and the learning cliff is gone to get the correct CLI commands and digging into system logs.
When you build something small, you can easily see all the doors and properly guard them.
As you build something bigger and bigger, quickly, with several people building, guarding all the doors becomes exceptionally difficult without a kind of aggressive discipline which is contrary to the "go fast" culture.
Cybersecurity in practice until now, for most companies, has been an insurance problem, not a quality problem.
Such companies are quickly discovering that insurance is a post-hoc partial correction and not a proper solution.
This situation will not improve anytime soon for most companies.
The solution does not require any new magical tools.
Run agents and everything they build. Secure execution from the first sandbox
Getting hacked while in the business of selling a secure sandbox isn't really a good look. It seems like can't even trust anything these days. The other day OpenCode got hacked and leaked everyone's secrets inside .env to attackers and now this. Sigh.
Unfortunately I'm not longer using PaaS tools. Instead I use Azure for work and vps now for all my personal stuff. With AI it's easier than ever to lock a server down tight and mitigate this kind of exposure.
There's no amount of "nicer to use" that can replace security, at least certainly when selling to enterprises
Azure would beg to differ.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301854
But they are also very highly incentivized to be more secure. They have millions of customers (hence a correspondingly higher expectation of trust) and billions in revenue from the trillions in economic activity happening on those platforms (hence a correspondingly larger target on their backs.) This means exponentially higher liabilities. And that probably matters more than any other factor.
Broadly I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a platform-level breach involving an immature startup PaaS than a hyperscaler cloud, however I think for small teams the alternate risk you take on is that AWS/GCP/Azure are full of landmines and extremely easy to misconfigure in insecure ways if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you have AI telling you confidently wrong things.
So, you can always say: Look, it’s not us (especially not my org!). It f’ing Microsoft/AWS. Everyone got hacked.
You and your career are gonna be just fine.
Let us look on the front page and see if there are any, oh look here is one: https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case
I’m not even blaming Zuck for that, he didn’t really invent it, though he certainly popularized it — he just made an astute observation of the dynamics in software and turned it into a company motto.
My bridge that collapses is adequate and acceptable because other people make even worse bridges that collapse even easier? No, the bridge still collapses, everybody gets a F.
thats the crux; are you working for the paycheck, or for the truth?
could be both, but pretty much all "i was right" stories start with "everyone else said i was wrong"
If you think governments (US and China) are going to tolerate people using models for anti-social behavior, I have a datacenter to sell you.
We can lower our standards instead
Now, to be clear, abliteration was no state secret, but that blog post was pure accelerationism.
And no, before the labs there was a degree of fear for everyone to hack into some one else system. With the labs changing the narrative, anyone can just blame the agents for the breach, whoever did it would only get fame and no blame
And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that only re-encrypted versions are ever seen by the management/API web server. But fundamentally this display requirement means that if your management/API web server is compromised, users' secrets can be obtained by a process of impersonation.
If anything, AI makes running linux boxes much easier than 4 years ago; it's now faster and the learning cliff is gone to get the correct CLI commands and digging into system logs.
As you build something bigger and bigger, quickly, with several people building, guarding all the doors becomes exceptionally difficult without a kind of aggressive discipline which is contrary to the "go fast" culture.
Cybersecurity in practice until now, for most companies, has been an insurance problem, not a quality problem.
Such companies are quickly discovering that insurance is a post-hoc partial correction and not a proper solution.
This situation will not improve anytime soon for most companies.
The solution does not require any new magical tools.
If I go on wayback a few days, I can see Sentry: https://web.archive.org/web/20261026032756/https://northflan...
Unfortunately I'm not longer using PaaS tools. Instead I use Azure for work and vps now for all my personal stuff. With AI it's easier than ever to lock a server down tight and mitigate this kind of exposure.