Thieves pilfer environment variables from Trigger AI workflow tool

So, who's ready to clear the dust out of that server closet and move things back on-prem?

If you're a customer of cloud-hosted AI workflow platform Trigger.dev, take heed, because your environment variables may have been exposed in a security incident disclosed on Sunday.

Trigger offered little explanation in its Sunday security incident report, noting that its investigation had identified “exposure across a subset of organizations” and that an attacker had gained unauthorized access to environment variables belonging to those organizations.

Whatever exploit was used to gain access has been blocked, the company added, and affected customers have been notified of steps they need to take to prevent further security problems.

REG AD

We likely don't have to tell The Reg readers how important environment variables are in SaaS and cloud services like Trigger. If compromised environment variables contain sensitive credentials, an attacker could basically end up with the keys to the kingdom, potentially gaining access to connected services and digital infrastructure.

REG AD

For those unfamiliar with Trigger.dev, it’s a platform for building AI agents and workflows in TypeScript, but here’s the kicker: Trigger advertises itself as a durable execution platform that handles pesky things like retries, scaling, and keeping long-running tasks going through crashes and redeployments, while providing tools to monitor what those tasks are doing.

Trigger, the company’s site notes, can be used to “build durable AI agents that survive refreshes, redeploys, and crashes,” and is ideal for “long-running tasks with retries, queues, AI observability and elastic scaling.”

In short, companies running their AI on Trigger probably want it to keep running, which makes stolen environment variables all the more dangerous. 

Elastic scaling, automated retries, and, as Trigger notes, the ability to run lots of concurrent operations without timeouts could compound the consequences of compromised API keys, depending on what those credentials allow an attacker to access.

An attacker with stolen credentials could potentially interfere with a customer's connected services or workflows. Additionally, Trigger recently added webhooks to its offering, supporting services like Stripe, Supabase, and Slack, potentially expanding the range of integrations that could be affected if their credentials were exposed.

This could be pretty bad for anyone affected. Trigger has some fairly high-profile customers, with companies like fashion brand Emporio Armani, Pentagon-supporting AI acquisitions platform GovSignals, SaaS calendar platform Cal.com, and others all listed on the company’s site. Trigger has not publicly identified which organizations were affected by the intrusion.

We reached out to Trigger, which declined to provide any additional information on the incident. A company spokesperson instead told us to wait for a full incident report to learn more. 

Luckily for Trigger customers and those concerned about SaaS security now that AI is regularly coming up with new vulnerabilities in commonly used platforms, Trigger is open source and can be self-hosted, which might be a better alternative in this day and age than relying on a hosted service.  ®