Shadow AI's Hidden Threat: Massive Exposure of Vibe-Coded Apps

RedAccess uncovered 380,000 public apps, databases and assets built on Lovable, Base44, Replit and Netlify. About 5,000 (?1.3 %) contained sensitive corporate data, such as a shipping company’s vessel schedule, a UK health-care firm’s clinical-trial list, a British cabinet supplier’s customer-service transcripts, a Brazilian bank’s internal financials, and patient conversations from a children’s long-term care facility. Axios and Wired independently verified several leaks.

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Vibe-coding platforms let product managers and citizen developers generate code in hours. Default configurations keep new apps public unless users manually enable privacy, allowing search engines to index them. RedAccess calls this “shadow AI” a production tier that evades conventional asset-discovery tools.

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Escape.tech’s October 2025 scan of 5,600 vibe-coded apps revealed over 2,000 high-impact vulnerabilities, 400 exposed secrets, and 175 personal-data breaches. Phishing sites impersonating Bank of America, FedEx, Trader Joe’s and McDonald’s were also built on Lovable.

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RedAccess CEO Dor Zvi said the issue stems from platform defaults, not isolated misconfigurations. Replit CEO Amjad Masad noted RedAccess warned his firm only 24 hours before the story broke. Lovable and Base44 confirmed the apps existed but said they never received the URLs needed for verification. Wix patched a platform-wide authentication bypass within 24 hours after a Wiz Research report and highlighted the thin security controls on mass-deployment services.

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Both Lovable and Base44 argue that security responsibility rests with end users, not the platforms. Lovable disputes the CVE-2025-48757 classification, insisting customers must protect their own data. The firms also reported that RedAccess did not provide URLs or technical specifics, limiting independent verification. No comprehensive inventory of vibe-coded apps exists in most enterprises, leaving total exposure unknown.

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• “I don’t think it’s feasible to educate the whole world around security. My mother is [vibe coding] with Lovable, and no offense, but I don’t think she will think about role-based access.” — Dor Zvi, CEO, RedAccess

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• “It did not generate the security policies that should have restricted who could read the data.” — Dor Zvi, RedAccess

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• “Lovable disputes the CVE classification, stating that individual customers accept responsibility for protecting their application data.” — Lovable spokesperson

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• “Replit CEO Amjad Masad said RedAccess gave his company only 24 hours before going to the press.” — VentureBeat report (attributed to Amjad Masad)

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Escape.tech secured an $18 million Series A round in March 2026, citing the shadow-AI gap as a market driver. Gartner predicts prompt-to-app approaches will increase software defects by 2,500 % by 2028. RedAccess recommends a five-domain audit framework—discovery, authentication, code scanning, data-loss-prevention, and governance—paired with DNS and certificate-transparency scans of Lovable, Replit, Base44 and Netlify subdomains to surface hidden assets.

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