STUPID-2026-0032

Scan of 5,600 vibe-coded apps found 2,000+ high-impact vulns, 400+ exposed secrets, PII leaks

8.0high
October 15, 2025Source checkedStudy · not counted in agent averages

Why 8/10

An aggregate scan, not one incident: real live apps with real exposed secrets and PII, but no specific harm event is documented.

Scope
4/4
Many organisations or the public: a flaw in a widely used product, mass exposure, a large outage
Recoverability
2/3
Partly lost, or loss reported without saying whether it was recovered
Did it happen
1/2
Demonstrated (proof of concept, reproduction, controlled test or near-miss) with no real victim reported
Beyond the user
1/1
Production systems, customers or third parties, or credentials and sensitive personal data

The score is the sum of these four factors. How each factor is scored · scored 2026-10-29

  1. Instruction given

    Build production web applications by prompting AI agents ('vibe coding').

  2. Expected behavior

    Generated apps should apply basic security fundamentals — auth, database protections, secret management, input validation.

  3. Actual behavior

    An October 2025 scan of 5,600 publicly reachable vibe-coded apps found more than 2,000 high-impact vulnerabilities, over 400 exposed secrets including API keys and access tokens, and 175 instances of PII exposure — including medical records and bank account numbers.

  4. Damage

    AI agents produced code that worked functionally but skipped the security fundamentals experienced developers apply instinctively, at a scale spanning thousands of live applications and real corporate and personal data.

Full write-up

In October 2025, API security firm Escape scanned 5,600 publicly available 'vibe-coded' applications — apps built primarily by prompting AI agents. The scan found more than 2,000 high-impact vulnerabilities, over 400 exposed secrets including API keys and access tokens, and 175 instances of PII exposure containing medical records and bank-account numbers. The systemic root cause is consistent across platforms: AI agents generate code that is functionally correct but skips the security fundamentals — authentication, database protections, secret handling, edge-case validation — that experienced engineers apply by reflex. The result is speed without safety, replicated across thousands of live applications.

Classification

Agent
Multiple agents
Failure mode
Security Vulnerability
Root cause
Training Data Gap
Domain
Backend
MIT AI Risk Repository (our mapping)
2.2 AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks · 2.1 Compromise of privacy by leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information taxonomy
Source
Benchmark

Related incidents

9.0
Vibe-coded Moltbook exposed 1.5M API keys and 35,000 user emails via misconfigured database
9.0
Lovable-generated apps shipped without adequate Supabase row-level security, leaving databases readable and writable by anyone (CVE-2025-48757)
8.0
GitHub Copilot suggested 2,702 valid secrets — 33% of extracted keys were real, live credentials
1.0
Anthropic found Claude Opus 4 would blackmail testers in up to 96% of simulated shutdown scenarios
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Cite this record
StupidLLM. "STUPID-2026-0032: Scan of 5,600 vibe-coded apps found 2,000+ high-impact vulns, 400+ exposed secrets, PII leaks." AI Agent Incident Database, 2026. https://www.stupidllm.com/incident/STUPID-2026-0032/ (accessed 2026-10-29). CC BY 4.0.

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