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GitBook breach exposed Git Sync secrets: what to rotate

An attacker may have read GitBook's integration tokens and Git Sync secrets. For GitLab users that includes a token with write access to the repo.

By 28creation Desk 3 min read

The short read

GitBook says an attacker may have read its customers' Git Sync secrets, API tokens and integration tokens.

  • The attacker reached GitBook infrastructure credentials on November 2. GitBook revoked every personal API token and found no sign that content was changed.

What you can do with this

If you sync GitBook with GitLab, revoke that GitLab access token in GitLab and make a new one. It can write to your repository, and GitBook's own token reset does not touch it.

A dense tangle of blue, white and red network cables hanging down the front of a server rack.
Photo: Kim Scarborough, CC BY-SA 2.0

GitBook, a platform for product and API documentation, says an attacker got into its infrastructure on November 2. In its security notice, the company says the attacker “may have accessed” integration tokens, Git Sync secrets, API tokens and the questions site visitors asked GitBook Assistant.

If your docs live on GitBook, some of the keys that connect it to your other tools should now be treated as known to someone else. GitBook has already revoked one kind. The rest are yours to replace.

What GitBook has said so far

The attacker “gained unauthorized access to some of our infrastructure credentials” at 19:00 CET on November 2, which is 18:00 UTC, the notice says. GitBook calls it “a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents” but has not said how the attacker got in or how many customers were affected. It promises a full post-mortem.

GitBook took the app and authenticated docs sites offline, replaced every credential and secret in its infrastructure and “invalidated every customer’s API tokens.” By its 16:21 CET update on November 3, the app, the API and published docs were back. It says it has “found no evidence that any of your content in GitBook was modified.”

The advice changed during the day. GitBook’s 13:15 CET update, still on the same page, said “Action required: None at this time.” The later update lists four steps for customers. Crypto.news also noted the change.

A customer posted GitBook’s support reply on Hacker News and wrote they had “yet to see any official customer communication or breach notification.” When we checked early on November 4 UTC, the status page named a “Security incident” but did not mention exposed data or token rotation.

Why the Git Sync secret is the one to worry about

Git Sync connects a GitBook space to a Git repository, so GitBook must hold a credential for your code host.

For GitLab, that credential is a personal access token you create and paste into GitBook. GitBook’s GitLab Sync guide tells you to enable the api, read_repository and write_repository scopes, and to pick the Maintainer or Admin role if the token has one. That is a token that can write to your repository. Revoking GitBook’s own tokens does nothing to it; only GitLab can kill it.

GitHub Sync works differently: it uses the GitBook GitHub app and your GitHub account, and the guide does not mention a personal token. GitBook has not said which Git Sync secrets the attacker may have seen.

What to do now

  1. GitLab Sync users: revoke the token in GitLab under your user settings, create a new one with the same scopes and enter it in GitBook. Then check the GitLab audit log and the synced repository for pushes you did not make.
  2. GitHub Sync users: review which repositories the GitBook GitHub app can reach and trim it to the docs repos it needs. Check recent commits on those repos.
  3. API tokens: your old personal tokens are already dead, so any script or CI job that calls the GitBook API will fail until you create a new token in Developer settings.
  4. Other connected tools: rotate any third-party key you entered in GitBook, plus secrets in published integrations, and re-authenticate the GitBook MCP server if you use it, as the notice asks.

The cost is time spent on key swaps and some broken sync jobs while you do it. Waiting for the post-mortem is the riskier choice. Wiz counted nine AI developer platforms that disclosed incidents in October, with attackers “explicitly hunting stored environment variables,” as we reported on November 2. A write token to your repository is worth more to them than your docs.

Sources

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