Popular continuous integration and delivery platform CircleCI recently announced that malefactors had infiltrated the company’s database, gaining access to customers’ private encryption keys, along with other valuable customer data. Such breaches can have long-term consequences for CircleCI, customers, and the larger DevOps community.
In a statement, CircleCI said the malefactors had accessed the environment variables, authentication tokens, and SSH keys that customers had stored on the platform for continuous integration and delivery processes. These credentials can provide malefactors access to unprotected customer resources, and allow them to perform malicious activity on those resources.
CircleCI have stated that they have implemented two-factor authentication and are setting up encryption protocols to prevent malicious actors from further accessing customers’ secrets. They have also implemented processes that identify suspicious activities, such as potential compromises to customer-stored credentials.
Although the retrieval of customer secrets was limited to those stored within the CircleCI environment, customers are encouraged to take secure steps to mitigate any exposure to their valuable data. This includes changing passwords, rotating encryption keys, and monitoring for suspicious activity on their systems.
The CircleCI breach serves as an important reminder that security should remain top of mind when deploying DevOps pipelines. Security tools like two-factor authentication should be adopted wherever possible, and customers should routinely monitor for suspicious activity on their systems. As such changes are put in place, CircleCI will have the ability to persist even after the breach, and customers will be able to rest assured that their valuable data remains safe and secure.
