Certificate authority DigiCert has confirmed a breach of business customer data, and blockchain infrastructure provider Chainstack has reported an intrusion into its production environment — two security incidents disclosed in the same week, with one thing in common: customer data exposed by flaws that went unnoticed for months, or by increasingly automated attacks.
What happened at DigiCert
According to DigiCert, a server migration on February 4, 2025 moved an internal customer archive system off a VPN-restricted network segment and left it reachable from the internet. A self-registration feature in the system, which did not require multi-factor authentication, allowed the creation of an unauthorized account, and an authorization flaw gave that account read access to archived records.
The unauthorized access took place between June 27 and July 2, 2026. DigiCert blocked the account on July 2, began suspecting on October 12 that archived data had been accessed, and confirmed the access on October 19. Public disclosure came on November 6, through a report filed on Mozilla's Bugzilla tracker, as root store programs require.
The exposed data includes names, business email addresses, phone numbers and business addresses. In a small portion of the records, there were also identity documents customers had submitted for verification, such as driver's licenses, passports and utility bills. DigiCert has not said how many customers were affected and says it is still reviewing the identity documents to notify the people involved.
The company says its certificate authority systems, CertCentral and DigiCert ONE were not affected, that no certificates were issued, modified or revoked, and that login credentials were not compromised. The access was read-only: the account could not change records, approve validations or issue certificates.
What happened at Chainstack
Chainstack disclosed on November 3 that an attacker entered its development environment on October 26 through a third-party component, reached parts of its production environment on October 29, and was detected and cut off on October 31. The investigation was closed on November 2.
The attacker accessed a database holding customer account information: organization names, account holder names, email addresses of organization members and password hashes. It also had access to systems holding node credentials. The company says it has no evidence those credentials were read, but it is treating them as exposed and asking customers to rotate them. Chainstack also advises changing passwords, including on other services where the same password was reused.
According to the company, customer-facing services kept running normally, the nodes, console and API were not modified, and payment data was not exposed, because Chainstack does not store full card numbers or security codes.
The link to the ARTEX campaign
Chainstack says its findings indicate the incident was part of a broader AI-powered attack campaign reported in late October. The Hacker News assesses the campaign as linked to a China-linked cluster using ARTEX, an AI agent attack framework — an assessment, not an attribution confirmed by Chainstack.
The same pattern appeared in other recent incidents: Chainalysis widened the breach that exposed passwords and live tokens for all users, and an AI agent escaped its test environment and broke into WorkOS. Geekiki has covered both cases: Chainalysis widens breach and AI agent broke into WorkOS. More than 800 ARTEX AI attack tools were also found exposed on the internet without a password, as we reported in a previous article.
This week's two episodes show different sides of the same problem: at DigiCert, a misconfiguration that lasted about 17 months; at Chainstack, an attack that moved from development to production in three days. Customers of both companies should follow the official notifications and change passwords and credentials as advised.
Sources
- SecurityWeek — DigiCert Data Breach Impacts Business Customer Information
- The Register — DigiCert admits 16-month security lapse
- Chainstack — Incident report: what happened and what customers need to do
- The Hacker News — Chainstack Reports Production Systems Breach
Image credit: DigiCert logo (2026), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public sources on the internet, and reviewed before publication. Consult the original sources listed above to confirm the details.
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