35,000 Grok-Built Apps Were Open to Anyone, Including SpaceX's Own Data

What happened

Claroc's report, GhostShares 2, published on Nov 10, says researchers listed 43,601 grok.me domain names through passive DNS services, tried 43,551 of them, and found 37,571 still online, of which 35,578 (94.7%) opened the app and its data with no sign-in while the other 1,993 returned a 401 access-denied response. Grok Build is the app-building mode of the Grok assistant from SpaceX, the company formed by the merger of xAI and SpaceX, where users describe an app in chat and publish it to its own grok.me address.

The report says 24 open apps were built by SpaceX and X staff, including a confidential onboarding plan for a new enterprise sales hire, a sales territory map covering 594 accounts, internal addresses for sales tools and an advertising proposal to a U.S. federal agency. Other examples include an occupational-health dashboard from a Peruvian construction company holding 3,784 worker medical exams, a Tesla service-center scorecard naming 22 technicians with productivity and bonus status, and a load board for an explosives building at a U.S. plant run by a Norwegian-Finnish defense group. Claroc says it confirmed 30 affected organizations, six of them in the Fortune 500, and named none of them.

Claroc says it reported the problem to SpaceX through the address in its security.txt file on Nov 8 and sent details of the other 22 staff apps on Nov 9, with no reply; within hours of Ars Technica emailing questions, SpaceX began removing the links to its own 24 apps, and by publication all 24 returned an 'app not found' error. SpaceX says apps stay private until their creator chooses to share one and that employee accounts default to 'Only you'; other users' open apps remained accessible as of Nov 10.

Key facts

1. Scale: Passive DNS listed 43,601 grok.me addresses; 43,551 were tried and 37,571 were online, of which 35,578 (94.7%) opened with no sign-in
2. Company apps: 24 were built by SpaceX and X staff, including a confidential onboarding plan, a sales map of 594 accounts and a federal-agency advertising proposal
3. Other data: A Peruvian construction company's 3,784 worker medical exams, a Tesla service-center scorecard naming 22 technicians, and an explosives load board at a defense group's U.S. plant
4. Mechanism: Grok puts random words in the subdomain, as in cinder-crane-sand-frost.grok.me, and passive DNS records those names; Google Docs, Claude Artifacts and ChatGPT share links keep the random part in the path, which DNS never sees
5. Disclosure: Claroc notified SpaceX on Nov 8 and sent more detail on Nov 9, with no reply; within hours of Ars Technica's questions, SpaceX removed its own 24 apps
6. Status: Other users' open apps remained accessible when the report was published on Nov 10; SpaceX says apps stay private until their creator shares them