Fireworks AI breach exposed Notion customers’ chat transcripts

The breach of cloud provider Fireworks AI gave attackers access to the company’s internal systems and some customer data. Notion was among those affected: hackers stole transcripts of chats by Notion AI users who had used the Insights feature. Notion said the incident affected about 1% of its customers. Fireworks AI also reported the theft of customer payment information and some datasets.

Fireworks AI breach exposed Notion AI customer chats

What data was stolen

Fireworks AI is a platform that lets developers use open AI models. The company said attackers breached its cloud provider’s infrastructure and then gained access to Fireworks’ development system and some customer data.

In a security notice, Fireworks reported the theft of customer payment information and certain datasets. Tens of thousands of customers around the world use the platform, including legal technology company Harvey and AI company Cursor.

Notion, a document editor and note-taking app, confirmed that the incident affected about 1% of its customers. The company said Fireworks first notified it of the issue and later confirmed that Notion user data had been stolen.

On November 3, Notion disconnected its systems from Fireworks, deleted the data stored there, and ended all connections between the companies.

This week, Notion clarified that the stolen records were chats belonging to Notion AI customers who had used the Insights feature. The transcripts included users’ messages and the model’s responses, if they had been saved in the chat. A significant portion of the data, however, could not be linked to a specific customer.

Why Notion was affected

The incident shows how an attack on one technology provider can spread to its customers: companies rely on external services that support their own products.

Fireworks believes the attackers were motivated by money. The company says they intended to sell the access to large language models they obtained in the breach. Such schemes let outsiders use models without spending their own resources.

This is the second security incident involving Fireworks in a matter of months; the previous one took place in October.

Dataist’s take: The incident affected not only Fireworks’ infrastructure but also data belonging to users of a service that relied on its systems. Notion said some transcripts could not be linked to specific customers, leaving the scale of the exposure of individual users’ data unclear.