Gitbook Breached

Posted by punchmesan 3 days ago

Counter164Comment45OpenOriginal

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

Comments

Comment by SamyPesse 3 days ago

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.

Comment by xmcp123 2 days ago

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

Good work.

Comment by throwrioawfo 2 days ago

Did you read the body of this post?

Comment by john_strinlai 2 days ago

>Nice to see someone not fucking up outreach

it is sort of funny to see this on a post submitted by a gitbook user that starts off by saying "We have yet to see any official customer communication or breach notification.", and where the company's status page (https://www.gitbookstatus.com/incidents/01M6FXDDGQRWHMYYWXY2...) doesn't mention the customer data that was potentially accessed by the attackers or mention that credentials/tokens should be rotated.

in fact, that status page (which is linked to at the top of the gitbook site) still says "You don’t need to do anything right now."

Comment by michaelscott 1 day ago

Experienced this with a client as well, all my thoughts to you guys and the team. One thing we struggled with was determining the effective blast radius of compromised credentials. Blocking access was one thing, but the other critical component was whether activity could be reconstructed from independent logs (for this event and in future). Intereseted in whether the postmortem covers how you guys have established those boundaries, would make for some good learnings in general.

Feels like a new normal

Comment by gkoberger 3 days ago

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

Comment by gk1 2 days ago

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.

Comment by latchkey 3 days ago

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.

Comment by MrZander 2 days ago

> 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.

Comment by michaelscott 1 day ago

Generally the speed of breaking through components of the tech stack. They chain exploits and they move through the system at a rate that's far faster than even a team of humans could pull off

Comment by ipsum2 2 days ago

My guess is the speed of exfiltration/exploration of the environment is probably impossible for a human, or even a small team. But I'm also curious what their evidence is.

Comment by conartist6 2 days ago

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

Comment by philipwhiuk 3 days ago

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.

Comment by FastDeep 2 days ago

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.

Comment by petecooper 3 days ago

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

Comment by philipwhiuk 3 days ago

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

Comment by SamyPesse 3 days ago

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...).

Comment by philipwhiuk 22 minutes ago

Just to be clear you have:

* https://www.gitbook.com/status

* https://status.gitbook.com/

* https://www.gitbookstatus.com/

You get why this is confusing, right?

Comment by sitzkrieg 2 days ago

the classic failure mechanism in the status page

Comment by eddythompson80 2 days ago

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

Comment by tmp219380123809 1 day ago

That isn't a dedicated security status page, it's their main website.

The actual status page appears to be hosted on incident.io https://www.gitbookstatus.com/incidents/01M6FXDDGQRWHMYYWXY2...

Comment by Panino 2 days ago

If it was made by a web designer, then yes. It's also nice to have 151 HTML warnings and errors:

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gitbook.c...

And images that are 4x larger than necessary on the main page (nevermind whether the images add value to begin with):

https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com/results/261104_YiDc1V_1W

There are maybe 10 websites that look good "inside and out" because web design is a broken field run by non-technical people.

Comment by MonstraG 2 days ago

I wanna note that some (52) of those are "css property corner-shape doesn't exist", and it does, just isn't supported in all browsers yet.

Comment by SamyPesse 2 days ago

A quick update to this thread that the incident is resolved, and we'll be publishing a post-mortem in the next 24 hours covering what happened, the impact it had, what we did to resolve, and what'll we do next. You can get an update when this is out on GitBook status page.

Comment by Panino 2 days ago

I think the timing is perfect for someone to create a simple, clean, breach link aggregator site.

Comment by ahoog42 2 days ago

I built this incident tracker a few years ago [1] but currently focus on SEC, State AG, and HHS posted incidents. There's a lot of noise if you go with news, blog, and company posts but I process them occasionally.

[1] https://www.board-cybersecurity.com/incidents/tracker

Comment by manytimesaway 3 days ago

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

Comment by SamyPesse 3 days ago

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.

Comment by manytimesaway 2 days ago

To be fair, I don't recall exactly the end of it either (I did not think it was that long ago!), but I remember being severely disappointed by the sudden disappearance of it (AFAIK I was trying to set it up inside a community project), and as such not trusting GitBook afterwards.

Thanks for the honest answer, nonetheless. Good luck with the incident.

Comment by viccis 3 days ago

Not really relevant here.

Comment by FearNotDaniel 2 days ago

> sophisticated, highly targeted attack

I love the way all incident reports tell you the attack was sophisticated and highly targeted, as if those words actually mean anything. Nobody wants to admit they were DDOSed by a script kiddie just randomly trying exploits. The subtext is: well, we expected hackers; just not really good ones.

Comment by aliasxneo 3 days ago

"GitBook has been the target of a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents."

Add it to the list, I guess.

Comment by nsoam 3 days ago

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.

Comment by SamyPesse 2 days ago

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.

Comment by eichin 2 days ago

For a lot of places, handling this kind of incident response was "eating your vegetables" preparation that has just in the last couple of months turned into "for me it was Tuesday"...

Comment by altbdoor 3 days ago

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

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

Comment by latchkey 3 days ago

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?

Comment by SamyPesse 3 days ago

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

Comment by latchkey 22 hours ago

two days later...

Comment by SamyPesse 20 hours ago

Sorry about that, I should have posted here. We posted a post mortem yesterday: https://www.gitbook.com/status/security-incident-2026-11-03

Comment by latchkey 19 hours ago

Thanks Samy.

"Using a flaw in GitBook’s SSO login flow, they were able to create login sessions acting as GitBook staff."

Since this has now been closed, can we have more details on what happened?

Comment by tom1337 2 days ago

What's happening currently that every other a day a major service is breached? Is it really just all AI Agents being blasted on those targets?

Comment by morserer 2 days ago

I have to suspect it's the aftermath of the many, many CVEs from this last month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_October_(information_sec...

Comment by punchmesan 3 days ago

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

Comment by verdverm 3 days ago

new lines between bullets, only italics available, not markdown

Comment by kruthikiran2007 2 days ago

[flagged]