Vibe-Coded Apps Top 10
When you're hacking fast, skipping steps, and pushing ahead
The funniest, most painful ways fast hacks become real security problems. Perfect for indie hackers, students, and engineering teams building quick demos and prototypes.
1. Hardcoded Secrets Everywhere
What It Looks Like
API keys, database credentials, and tokens committed directly to repositories or exposed in build logs.
Why It Matters
One leaked key equals full environment access, often discovered through automated scanning of public repositories.
Real-World Incidents
Uber (2016)
GitHub keys led to AWS access and massive data breach
2. "It Works on My Machine" Deploys
What It Looks Like
Environment-specific hacks shipped to production, with old feature flags reviving dead code paths.
Why It Matters
Small configuration drift can lead to catastrophic behavior under production load.
Real-World Incidents
Knight Capital (2012)
Deployment and flag configuration error resulted in $440-460M loss in minutes
3. Schema Drift
What It Looks Like
Database migrations skipped locally, production and staging environments diverge, ad-hoc SQL hotfixes.
Why It Matters
Silent data corruption occurs during reads/writes, and rollbacks fail when schemas are inconsistent.
4. Broken Auth Flows
What It Looks Like
Weak or missing multi-factor authentication, token handling shortcuts, and session reuse vulnerabilities.
Why It Matters
Enables lateral movement through systems and large-scale data exfiltration.
Real-World Incidents
Microsoft Storm-0558 (2023)
Stolen signing key enabled token forgery and mailbox access across multiple tenants
5. Shadow Dependencies
What It Looks Like
Copy-pasted code from unknown sources, unpinned package versions, and abandoned dependencies.
Why It Matters
Creates supply-chain attack vectors and sudden application breakages.
Real-World Incidents
event-stream hijack (2018)
Malicious code injected into popular npm library affected thousands of applications
ua-parser-js malware (2021)
Popular npm package compromised with malware affecting millions of downloads
left-pad incident (2016)
Package removal due to unpinned dependencies "broke the internet"
6. Silent Failures (No Logging/Monitoring)
What It Looks Like
Swallowed exceptions, expired certificates, and missing audit trails that hide ongoing breaches.
Why It Matters
Security incidents persist undetected for months, maximizing damage and data exposure.
Real-World Incidents
Equifax (2017)
Expired certificate blinded monitoring systems for 76 days during active breach
7. Over-Permissive Defaults
What It Looks Like
Wildcard CORS policies, public read access on storage and databases, admin privileges by default.
Why It Matters
Enables drive-by data theft and ransomware attacks on exposed resources.
Real-World Incidents
MongoDB Ransomware (2017)
Thousands of MongoDB instances exposed with default settings, leading to mass ransomware attacks
8. Config Chaos (Staging ≠ Prod)
What It Looks Like
Feature toggles managed by commenting code, stale environment variables, and surprise side effects.
Why It Matters
A single configuration difference can destroy application availability.
Real-World Incidents
Fastly Global Outage (2021)
Latent bug triggered by specific customer configuration caused worldwide internet outage
9. Feature Flags by Commenting Out Code
What It Looks Like
Using code comments as feature toggles, allowing dead code paths to randomly reactivate.
Why It Matters
Creates regression roulette under system stress when commented code gets uncommented.
Note: See Knight Capital incident above for real-world impact.
10. No Backup Plan
What It Looks Like
Untested restore procedures and treating database replicas as backups.
Why It Matters
Results in permanent data loss when primary systems fail.
Real-World Incidents
GitLab Database Incident (2017)
Production database wiped with failed backups and replication, causing significant data loss
Laugh, Then Fix It
Use our interactive demos to experience and mitigate each failure mode. Bugsy and friends will guide you through the chaos.