Over 35,000 Grok-Built Apps Exposed Online, Some Leaking Confidential Data and Passwords

A security analysis has revealed that over 35,000 applications built using the Grok AI assistant are publicly accessible, with some exposing sensitive internal information.

Of the 37,571 Grok-built apps that security company Claroc found online, 35,578 were open to anyone without a sign-in, the researchers said yesterday.

The researchers discovered the apps by using common subdomain discovery methods and loading each app's first page once, without signing in.

Confidential Data Leaked

Most of the open apps were games, landing pages, and calculators, but about 1 in 10 contained internal business or personal data.

The exposed material included a hospital group's searchable list of more than 3,500 employees, an intensive care briefing on a single patient, and a fire department's live shift board.

A contractor's timesheet whose code held every employee's password in plain text was also found among the exposed files.

The researchers' estimate in their report suggests that roughly 2% of the open apps contained material serious enough to rate as high or critical.

These apps belonged to 30 other organizations the researchers could identify, across fields ranging from construction and energy to healthcare and defense.

Of those, 26 have more than 1,000 employees, and 6 are Fortune 500 companies.

Staff Apps Exposed

Among the exposed apps were 24 built by staff at the social network X and at SpaceXSI, the company that makes the Grok AI assistant.

The staff apps included a confidential onboarding plan for a new sales hire, a sales territory map of 594 accounts, and an X advertising proposal to a U.S. federal agency marked confidential.

SpaceXSI, formerly known as xAI, has since taken down all 24 staff apps but not other users' apps, the researchers said.

Security Flaws Found

The researchers tested Grok's app builder and found that even apps with sign-in buttons were not secure.

They built a test app for a 4-person sales team and found that Grok added each person who signed in to the team before checking whether they belonged, so the check always passed.

An uninvited Google account belonging to someone other than the owner got in, viewed every customer, edited one record, and deleted another.

The researchers reported their findings to SpaceXSI on Sunday through the address in its security.txt file, including 2 of the staff apps.

They reported the other 22 on Monday.

By the time they published yesterday, the company had not replied to their report, but it had answered a reporter's questions about the research.

Company Response and Next Steps

The company said Grok apps stay private until their creator shares them. Publishing takes several steps, including choosing between 'Only you' and 'Anyone with the link,' as well as a legal disclaimer. Employee accounts are set to 'Only you' by default.

Even so, 24 apps built by staff at the company and at X were open to anyone, the researchers say.

With their report, the researchers had asked the company to make 'Only you' the default and to add an option that limits an app to a company's own email domain.

The company's response did not state that it would contact the owners of other open apps, according to the researchers.

They have started emailing the affected organizations themselves and had emailed 3 by the time they published.

They withheld every app address and title from the report.

How to Check Your Organization's Grok Apps

Claroc, which sells tools to find and secure apps built with AI, recommends these checks:

• Find out which AI app builders your staff uses. Builders such as Grok, Lovable, Replit, v0, Bolt, Base44 and Google AI Studio can be used without IT setting them up or a company account.
• If you have access to passive DNS data, look up the builders' domains and open any results in a private browser window.
• Make sure any Grok app with internal data is set to 'Invited users' or 'Only you', and that a stranger gets an error page.
• Try to 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, and unpublish apps that have no owner.

In the researchers' tests, setting an app to 'Only you' caused it to return a 401 error to a stranger for both the page and its data, and unpublishing took an app offline within seconds.