Mercor says it was hit by cyberattack tied to compromise LiteLLM | Hacker News Reader

Mercor says it was hit by cyberattack tied to compromise LiteLLM

techcrunch.com

151 pointsjackson-mcd45 comments

> The incident also prompted LiteLLM to make changes to its compliance processes, including shifting from controversial startup Delve to Vanta for compliance certifications.

This is pretty funny.

The leaked excel sheet with customers of Delve is basically a shortlist of targets for hackers to try now. Not that they necessarily have bad security, but you can play the odds

I am not defending Delve or anything and I hope they get what they deserver but there is no correlation between SOC2 certification and the actual cyber capability of a company. SOC2 and ISO27001 is just compliance and frankly most of it is BS.

Sure it's certainly not perfect and a lot of the documentation is something you just write for the audit and never look at it again but that's why I am saying play the odds. The average delve customer startup might be less secure that the average startup who has to justify their processes to a real auditor.

Personally, I use them as frameworks to justify management processes.

A) I tie the cybersecurity activities to business revenue enabling outcomes (unblocked contracts), and second to reduced risk (as people react less to this when spending the buck).

B) with the political capital from point A) I actually operate a cybersecurity program, justify DevSecOps artefacts, threat modeling, incident response exercises, etc.

What this SOC2 reports, ISO27k certificates are, more like a standardization for communicating the activities of the org to outside people, and getting an external person to vet that the org doesn't bulls*t too much. but at the end of the day, the organization is responsible for keeping their house in order.

I went through SOC2 Type I and II. I’d say that most of that stuff is necessary, like splitting environments and so on. That doesn’t mean it’s anything close to sufficient to avoid being hacked.

It’s a framework to give you the direction, then if employees are careless (or even malicious), no security standard is complete enough to protect a company.

Not to be pedantic about the topic but SOC 2 is an auditing standard, not a security framework. It defines what you’ll be assessed against but it doesn’t tell you how to build your security program. You’ll find the prescriptive controls in real frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST CSF, or CIS Controls which do give you a structure for implementing security.

Delve and Emdash. Are there more products or companies with similar names?

Polsia (AI slop backwards)

According to SemiAnalysis, it is akin to getting a FAA certification.

https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2035062702587232458

Some of it is, but things like "your stage/dev and production environments should be completely isolated from eachother" are valid and most tech companies get lazy on this front

It was never about cyber capability. It's a liability transfer framework.

If a service provider has a control that says "we use firewalls on all network access points, and configure those firewalls to CIS benchmark whatever", and a third-party signs off with "yes we checked, they have the firewalls, and they're configured properly", you now have two parties you can sue when a security incident caused by lack of firewalls causes you material damage.

Your org's cyber insurance will also go down if you can say "all our vendors have third-party attested compliance, and we do annual compliance reviews".

It might feel like BS, and I'm inclined to agree with you because of the security theater aspect. (For example, Mercor had their verification done by what appears to be a legitimate audit firm.)

But it's not useless. It still forces you to go through a very useful exercise of risk modeling and preparation that you most likely won't do without a formal program.

If your goal is to maximize your posture against cyber threats, spending your time on SOC 2 compliance with Vanta (or similar) is a waste of time if you consider the amount of time spent compared to security gained.

It's incredibly easy to get SOC 2 audited and still have terrible security.

> forces you to go through a very useful exercise of risk modeling

Have you actually done this in Vanta, though? You would have to go out of your way to do it in a manner that actually adds significant value to your security posture.

(I don't think SOC/ISO are a waste of time. We do it at our company, but for reasons that have nothing to do with security)

Probably the most useful aspect of SOC2 is that it gives the technical side of the business an easy excuse for spending time and money on security, which, in startup environment is not always easy otherwise (Ie “we have to dedicate time to update our out of date dependencies, otherwise we’ll fail SOC2”).

If you do it well, a startup can go through SOC2 and use it as an opportunity to put together a reasonable cybersecurity practice. Though, yeah, one does not actually beget the other, you can also very easily get a soc2 report with minimal findings with a really bad cybersecurity practice.

That's exactly what I've done in the past. We had to be soc2 and pci dss compliant (high volume so couldn't be through saq). I wouldn't say the auditor helped much in improving our security posture but allowed me to justify some changes and improvements that did help a lot.

The main use of these certs is to give people that actually want to do their job a stick to hit their bosses with.

It doesn't force you go through risk modelling because by now most SOC2 platforms have templates you just fill in the blanks and sign off. Conversely, the auditors are paid by the company, so their incentive is to pass the audit so the client can get what it wants.

Because there's no adversarial pressure as a check and balance to the security, and AICPA is clearly just happy to take the fees, it's a hollow shirt. It's like this scene from The Big Short. https://youtu.be/mwdo17GT6sg?si=Hzada9JcdIPfdyFN&t=140

As usual, it's only people that care that force positive change. The companies that want good security will have good security. Customers who want good security will demand good security.

Having been through SOC2, it doesn't mean a company is rock solid, but it definitely makes the company button up loose ends, if taken seriously.

Yes they may be a BS in certain cases, however its still better than nothing. They do allow the companies to consider the questions atleast instead of claiming unawareness and most importantly it facilitates the incremental improvement.

Second major supply chain compromise in a week after the axios npm attack. 40 minutes and 500k machines affected. SOC2 won't catch this. The real question is whether your CI pipeline would have flagged a dependency change that happened between your last build and the one going to prod. Most teams have no visibility into that window at all.

> SOC2 won't catch this

Cybersecurity professionals and their certification treadmill crack me up because of this

They get paid less, require more certifications to be marketable, all to simply show actual “computer wizards” where all the blind spots are

I am not disagreeing with your main point, but want to clarify that SOC2 is not an individual certification that a person achieves.

I am genuinely wonder if anyone have had success landing gigs at Mercor.

Given their AI "hiring / onboarding" process all I can say is; couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

I know of a couple people. It was a pretty miserable experience.

The way to get a gig at Mercor is to hack their LLM so that it inserts you as already hired.

Could not happened to a more usurious company.

LinkedIn itself is far from great, but this seems like a good thread to share my LinkedIn tip of creating a job alert using a search query like

rust embedded NOT lensa NOT jobot NOT alignerr NOT mercor NOT “crossing hurdles”

This is a good reminder that any tool handling sensitive data — even internal ones — needs to be transparent about where data goes. The assumption that SaaS tools protect your data is getting harder to defend.

I use llms to read the privacy policies that are too long to read. They guarantee almost nothing, unless you go out of your way to get an sla

all leaks are tied together

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