Northflank discloses security breach exposing customer AI API keys

Cloud application hosting platform Northflank disclosed a security incident on October 30 after receiving a threat alert from cloud security company Wiz, warning customers to immediately rotate their environment variables and API keys. According to Northflank's incident timeline, Wiz warned the company at 11:43 UTC on October 30, and engineers reviewed the alert one minute later. Northflank responded with a network policy patch, followed by additional patches at 12:50 UTC and 13:05 UTC, and requested assistance from Wiz's incident response team.

Soon after, Northflank told all customers to assume their environment variables had been decrypted and the secrets within them stolen. "Assume all environment variables have been decrypted. Disable/rotate all keys," Northflank warned in an October 30 update. The company later confirmed that multiple customers had reported unauthorised abuse of stored AI keys. "Users have reported unauthorised use of AI API keys supplied to the Northflank platform," the company said.

The company has not disclosed how attackers gained access to its systems, how many customers were affected, or whether credentials other than the reported AI API keys were stolen or abused. As part of its response, Northflank enabled credential rotation for PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis, and enabled audit logs for all customers, including free accounts, to help investigate suspicious activity.

Northflank noted that the unauthorised AI key usage may be tied to the attacks documented in Wiz's report, "Black October for AI Developer Platforms." Wiz identified at least nine security incidents affecting AI development platforms during the month, including Northflank, Railway, OpenCode, Warp, and Lightning AI. Wiz said attackers targeted environment variables containing AI service credentials for LLMJacking, using stolen credentials to access AI models or resell access. In two cases Wiz investigated, compromised enterprise credentials were used to make approximately 2.5 million Amazon Bedrock API calls, generating approximately $100,000 in AI usage.

While most of the October security incidents are still being analysed, Northflank continues to advise customers to rotate secrets stored in workloads, secret groups, and global secrets, and to disable public access to add-ons where enabled. Customers were also advised to review their AI provider usage and billing logs for unexpected activity and report suspicious usage to Northflank and their AI providers.

Sources: BleepingComputer, Wiz

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