The JSONFormatter Wake-Up Call: How Developer Tools Are the New Identity Breach Vector
Everyone uses developer tools to get through the day. A JSONFormatter to inspect an API response, or a JWT decoder when you need to inspect a token quickly. In most engineering teams, these tools are treated as harmless productivity aids. In November 2025, researchers discovered that JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify had been storing everything users pasted into them via a save feature that generated shareable links with fully predictable URL structures. A simple crawler could retrieve all of them.