Grok app builder: 35,578 public grok.me apps expose data and passwords
Researchers found 35,578 of 37,571 Grok-built apps open without sign-in, some with passwords; check app access settings and unpublish unowned apps.
- Published
- Exploitation
- No. The sources describe access by researchers without sign-in, and report no attacker abuse.
What happened
Security company Claroc examined apps made with Grok’s chat-based app builder, known as Build mode, which publishes each app on its own subdomain of grok.me. Of 37,571 apps found online, 35,578 opened for anyone without a sign-in, according to both Cyber Security News and The Hacker News. Cyber Security News adds that only 1,993 of them asked for a sign-in; The Hacker News does not give that figure.
Cyber Security News reports that the researchers started from a list of more than 43,500 grok.me addresses on November 8, 2026. They opened the first page of each app once, without signing in. The list came from passive DNS, which records website name lookups and lets anyone search them. Both outlets say Grok suggests four random words as each app’s name; such names are hard to guess, but they are not protected once they appear in a searchable list.
Most open apps were games, landing pages and calculators. About one in ten held internal business or personal data, and roughly 2% were serious enough to rate high or critical, according to both outlets. Examples reported:
- An intensive care briefing on a single patient.
- A hospital group’s list of more than 3,500 employees.
- A fire department’s shift board.
- A contractor’s timesheet app whose code held plain-text passwords; Cyber Security News puts the number at 18 staff accounts.
Both outlets say 24 apps built by staff at SpaceXSI (formerly xAI) and X were open. They included a confidential onboarding plan, a sales territory map of 594 accounts and an advertising proposal to a U.S. federal agency. The Hacker News says the researchers identified internal data from 30 other organizations, 26 of them with more than 1,000 employees and six of them Fortune 500 companies. Both outlets report that SpaceXSI took down its own 24 apps but not other users’ apps.
On defaults, The Hacker News reports that in the paid account the researchers used, the publish step offered “Anyone with the link”, “Invited users” and “Only you”, with “Anyone with the link” already selected. Cyber Security News likewise says paid-account apps defaulted to public link access. The Hacker News says the researchers also built two test apps with made-up data, on their own accounts only:
- A contact list that got a database but no sign-in, so a stranger could add a row.
- A team customer list with Google and X sign-in, where the generated code added each signed-in person to the team before checking membership. An uninvited Google account could view, edit and delete records.
The researchers did not test whether any of the open apps they found would accept such changes.
SpaceXSI’s position, as relayed by the researchers, is that apps stay private until the creator shares them, that publishing takes several steps, and that employee accounts default to “Only you”. Claroc replies that every owner of the open apps went through those same steps. The Hacker News reports that the researchers reported their findings through the company’s security.txt address, and that the company had not replied to the report by publication but had answered a reporter’s questions. Cyber Security News dates that reply to November 10, 2026. The researchers asked for “Only you” to become the default and for an option to limit an app to a company’s own email domain. Whether SpaceXSI will make either change is not confirmed.
Am I affected?
You may be affected if anyone in your organization has built and published an app with Grok’s Build mode, including on a personal or paid account without IT involvement. Both outlets note that builders such as Lovable and Replit, and Grok itself, need no IT approval; The Hacker News also lists v0, Bolt, Base44 and Google AI Studio.
An app is exposed if it is set to “Anyone with the link” and has no working sign-in check. The Hacker News reports that in the researchers’ tests, “Only you” returned a 401 error to a stranger for both the page and its data. How many of the 35,578 open apps hold sensitive data beyond the roughly one in ten reported is not confirmed. Whether anyone other than the researchers accessed these apps is not confirmed.
What to do now
- Find out which AI app builders your staff use, including Grok, Lovable, Replit, v0, Bolt, Base44 and Google AI Studio.
- List any grok.me apps your people have published. If you have passive DNS access, look up the builder’s domains and open results in a private browser window (suggested by The Hacker News, citing Claroc).
- For each Grok app holding internal data, set access to “Invited users” or “Only you”, then confirm a stranger gets an error page.
- Test sign-in with an account from outside your company. If it gets in, the app needs a list of who is allowed.
- Check the scripts each app loads for names, email addresses and passwords.
- Unpublish apps that have no owner. Both outlets report that unpublishing a grok.me app takes it offline within seconds.