Wiz Investigation: Attackers Stole AI Platform Keys, Made Millions of Bedrock API Calls in Hours
Cloud security firm Wiz found that after breaches at AI development platforms like Zeabur and Northflank, stolen API keys were used to make millions of unauthorized Amazon Bedrock calls, leading to Zeabur's shutdown.
Cloud security company Wiz recently released an investigation report indicating that during several cybersecurity incidents targeting AI development and deployment platforms in October, attackers successfully accessed sensitive credentials stored in customer environment variables. These environment variables often contain API keys for AI services, allowing attackers to use them for unauthorized calls once the platform was compromised.
Two cases of enterprise AI service key abuse tracked by Wiz showed that within less than 30 minutes of the platform provider reporting credential access, attackers began testing key validity, followed by large-scale calls to AWS's AI model service, Amazon Bedrock, days later. In one case, attackers used stolen keys to make approximately 800,000 API calls within 30 hours; in another, about 1.7 million calls were made within 13 hours. Researchers also linked some stolen keys to resale activities involving groups named momo and Xingjiabi.
The incidents involved two major platforms. Taiwan-based cloud deployment platform Zeabur was breached in mid-October, with attackers reading over 3.21 million environment variables and about 320,000 account records. Zeabur subsequently announced it would cease operations by December 31. Another cloud deployment platform, Northflank, also experienced a security incident in late October, with users reporting unauthorized use of their AI service API keys stored on the platform.
Northflank stated on November 2 that preliminary investigations suggest the attack activity may have focused on sensitive information stored in its control plane, with no signs yet of attackers accessing customers' running workloads or related data. The company has revoked some access tokens, terminated related sessions, and required all customers to immediately rotate sensitive credentials, including AI service API keys, cloud service credentials, private keys, and database passwords.