The SalesLoft Drift Chatbot Is Set to Go Offline After Customers Suffer Big Breaches – CX Today
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Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler are three businesses that fell victim to the SalesLoft attacks
Published: September 3, 2025
Charlie Mitchell
SalesLoft will temporarily shut down its Drift chatbot ‘in the very near future’ following security breaches affecting several customers.
These customers included prominent global brands, like Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler.
The move to take Drift offline comes after the company already paused its Salesforce integration.
In an update posted online on Tuesday, September 2, Drift stated: “This will provide the fastest path forward to comprehensively review the application and build additional resiliency and security in the system to return the application to full functionality.
As a result, the Drift chatbot on customer websites will not be available, and Drift will not be accessible.
SalesLoft Drift is a popular conversational AI application, interacting with website visitors and offering them a personalized buying experience.
Drift is part of SalesLoft’s sales engagement platform, leveraged by over 5,000 brands, including IBM, Shopify, and Stripe, alongside the companies listed above.
In short, attackers stole OAuth bearer tokens that SalesLoft held on its customers’ behalf.
These tokens connect Drift with their Salesforce instances. Yet, not only Salesforce. In many reported cases, the tokens connected to Google Workspace, AWS, Azure, and even OpenAI as well.
After stealing the credentials, the attackers began probing what they could access.
Eventually, the stolen tokens gave attackers access to accounts and services, exposing the data of SalesLoft’s customers’ customers.
The saga is a reminder of how messy OAuth can be. It also offers lessons for vendors like SalesLoft, who must protect customer tokens, and businesses, who need to be careful about the integrations they choose and the risks they carry.
The question that looms large over this incident is: how did the tokens disappear in the first place?
Perhaps it was a social engineering attack, a compromise of SalesLoft’s token store, or something else. It’s not clear. What is clear is that this isn’t a simple problem to fix.
As discussed on the Risky Business Podcast, there are technical mitigations that SalesLoft could establish to prevent similar incidents in the future.
For instance, OAuth extensions can bind tokens so they only activate from certain places. However, across multi-vendor workflows, that’s tricky to implement.
The vendor could also implement IP restrictions. Yet, with dynamic machine-to-machine communication, where IPs are constantly changing, this fallback won’t work so well in 2025.
SalesLoft will likely work through these considerations as it prepares to bring its bot off and back online. Yet, the affair should offer rival conversational AI vendors significant food for thought.
After all, attackers seem to have executed a new way to attack their customers, and not for the first time in recent months.
After a spout of chatbot faux pas last year, which included bots swearing at customers and inventing company policies, recent incidents are even more alarming.
While the SalesLoft example shows vulnerabilities within the vendor’s security posture, others highlight attackers successfully tricking chatbots into sharing sensitive data and information.
Consider a recent incident at Lenovo. With a stolen session cookie and a single, 400-character prompt, security researchers were able to slip into the support system via its chatbot Lena, without login details. They could then access past conversations.
Similarly, another team of ethical hackers from Zenity had a replica of McKinsey & Company’s chatbot spew entire Salesforce records.
Most worryingly, the Zenity team warned that over 3,500 public-facing agents are susceptible to similar attacks, and next time it may not be the good guys carrying them out…
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