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Hi everyone - WorkOS CEO here.

WorkOS's production systems are secure. No customer platform data was accessed. This incident was isolated to internal GTM systems.

The attack involved ARTEX, an autonomous AI agent framework used to carry out offensive security operations. It's a striking example of how quickly the capabilities of attackers are evolving.

We've contained the incident, brought in independent experts to investigate, and are working through the details.

Security is something we take extremely seriously, and I believe in being transparent when things go wrong. We'll continue to share updates as we learn more.

Here’s the full post: https://workos.com/security/bulletins/october-30th-2026-data...

If you are a customer and would like to have a call with our security team, please send a note to [email protected]


Thanks for being so transparent.

Is it understood what the initial attack vector was? How confident are you that compromise is contained to just this GTM application (and lateral movement/exposure hasnt occurred)?


We identified and verified the attack vector and have no indication there is other compromise.

In addition to our in-house security team, we also have hired a 3rd-party firm to do their own investigation and validate our analysis.

We hope to share more about our findings once the investigation concludes.


Thanks for the transparency

> The attack involved ARTEX

Why does it matter what framework is used?


It may not be relevant from your perspective, but yours isn't the only one. Others will find this detail useful or insightful, for any number of reasons.

So, why? Because details matter.


It is as useful as saying that attackers used Kali Linux - no details of what was actually exploited, just blaming some random tool.

They aren’t blaming a random tool, where do you see blame? For you this information may not be relevant but for many people in the cybersecurity sector it’s very relevant and helps put these frameworks into the spotlight. Sharing knowledge is not a bad thing.

This is the problem we've been working on solving with WorkOS Radar. We run it for Cursor and a bunch of other AI companies who have a free trial that gives some free inference to test the product.

It turns out to be a pretty complex program to solve at scale. Token fraud is a lucrative market and the adversaries are surprisingly sophisticated. It's a cat-and-mouse game, accelerated with AI.

https://workos.com/radar

(If you'd like to work on this, we are hiring :))


I don't think device fingerprinting is the right approach here.

Client-side detection can always be sidestepped, and you need to intermediate the actual inference to get enough signals to make an accurate prediction. There are hundreds of listings for cursor tokens/credits right now.

We use canary values to detect the resellers, and I believe that's the only approach that will actually work at scale.


We do a lot more than device fingerprinting including training custom fraud models. We don't broadly publish our techniques for detection since that would make them much easier to circumvent.


> We use canary values to detect the resellers, and I believe that's the only approach that will actually work at scale.

Can you elaborate how it works? Specific sequence of tokens acts as a canary?


sign up for the resellers, insert a random id canary into your requests, trace them back on your server to tie it to an account

find fingerprints / signatures of the accounts being used. ban all of them.

eventually build an ml based system that detects these at signup

reinforce with more data. loop forever, etc.


Custom roles per-org is supported natively with WorkOS. (I'm the founder.)

I think we have the most advanced RBAC system. You can even map roles from custom IdP groups via SCIM.

More info here: https://workos.com/guides/user-provisioning-scim


Hi I'm the founder of WorkOS.

We're working on multi-app support. The large majority of our customers only have 1 app (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, etc.) but this isn't the case for developers building lots of side projects.

Also working on shipping an agent-friendly Dashboard. Stay tuned :)

Would love to hear any more feedback: [email protected]


WorkOS has a built-in workflow for all the complex SAML/SCIM attribute mapping.

https://workos.com/docs/directory-sync/attributes

Also certificate renewal flows:

https://workos.com/changelog/certificate-renewal-flow

(I'm the founder.)


WorkOS powers auth for OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Perplexity, Clay, Webflow, Granola, and a bunch of others. Free up to 1m users, you pay for enterprise features.

I'm the founder and happy to help. We've differentiated by focusing on "b2b auth" via SAML/SCIM, but today we do everything else. We also have products for feature flags, encryption, bot blocking, MCP auth, etc.

Fun fact, we actually launched on HN in 2020 :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607402


This is awesome - I had heard the name floating around but didn't realize how permissive your free tier was. I'm using Clerk for my new project https://thoughtprint.space/ but might switch it over to WorkOS.


Docs to migrate from Clerk to WorkOS: http://workos.com/docs/migrate/clerk

Claude Code can often one-shot it. Feel free to reach out if I can help!


Recently I moved to WorkOS for modulus.so. love your product.

MCP auth and feature flags are two feature that got me in. I also like that it's flexible enough for me to write custom logic in auth flow - which a lot of providers tries to abstract.


What do you use for RBAC today? Do you have AI rewrite it every time?


The author of the initial comment mentioned that customers of contract work prefer code which is 100% theirs, purpose-written, not a dependency, even vendored.


If you’re looking for b2b identity, I’m the founder of WorkOS and we power this for a bunch of apps. Feel free to email me, [email protected]


We use WorkOS to support some of our offerings but not for our own corporate identity/authentication. I’m not close to the project so I don’t have experience using WorkOS but definitely curious about replacing Okta.



I lost track what they use … Auth0, Ory, WorkOS… sounds like they should go ahead and finally acquire something #scnr


It's so bad

Here is a major vulnerability we disclosed earlier this year:

https://workos.com/blog/samlstorm


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