Cloud application hosting platform **Northflank** is urging customers to rotate all credentials and secrets stored on its platform after a security breach resulted in the unauthorized use of customer AI API keys. **Northflank**, which enables developers to deploy and manage applications, containers, databases, and AI applications, disclosed the security incident on October 30. The warning came after receiving a threat alert from cloud security company **Wiz**. Initially, **Northflank** advised customers to immediately rotate their environment variables and API keys. Soon after, the company escalated its warning, instructing all customers to assume their environment variables had been decrypted and the secrets within them compromised. "Assume all environment variables have been decrypted. Disable/rotate all keys," **Northflank** stated in an October 30 update. Environment variables are commonly used by applications to store sensitive information such as database passwords, cloud service credentials, authentication tokens, and API keys. Their exposure can lead to breaches of other customer services, potential data theft, or unauthorized charges via API keys. **Northflank** later confirmed that multiple customers reported unauthorized use of AI API keys stored on the platform. "Users have reported unauthorised use of AI API keys supplied to the **Northflank** platform," the company announced. Customers who had not yet rotated user-provided secrets were advised to do so immediately. They were also urged to review their AI provider usage and billing logs for any unexpected activity and report suspicious usage to **Northflank** and their AI providers. ### Incident Response Timeline According to **Northflank**'s published timeline, **Wiz** alerted them to the breach at 11:43 UTC on October 30. **Northflank** engineers reviewed the alert within a minute, quickly responding with a network policy patch. Additional patches followed at 12:50 UTC and 13:05 UTC, and the company requested assistance from **Wiz**'s incident response team. While **Northflank** has not disclosed how attackers gained access, the number of affected customers, or whether credentials beyond AI API keys were stolen, their response included enabling credential rotation for **PostgreSQL**, **MongoDB**, **MySQL**, and **Redis**. Audit logs were also enabled for all customers, including those on free accounts, to aid in investigating suspicious activity. **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. ### Black October for AI Developer Platforms This incident is part of a series of attacks targeting AI development platforms, which security researchers believe are valuable targets due to the stored API keys that can access expensive AI services. In a report titled "[Black October for AI Developer Platforms](http://www.wiz.io/blog/black-october-for-ai-developer-platforms)," **Wiz** identified at least nine security incidents affecting AI development platforms during the month. These include **Northflank**, **Railway**, **OpenCode**, **Warp**, and **Lightning AI**. The **Railway** incident also involved potential exposure of decrypted customer environment variables, while **OpenCode** disclosed exposed AI API keys. **Warp** reported a breach exposing AI agent logs and user telemetry data. **Wiz** notes that attackers in some of these incidents specifically targeted environment variables containing AI service credentials, exploiting them through a practice known as **LLMJacking**. **LLMJacking** involves using stolen credentials to access AI models via another organization's API keys, leading to massive API charges or allowing the stolen access to be resold. **Wiz** investigated two cases where compromised enterprise credentials resulted in approximately 2.5 million **Amazon Bedrock** API calls, generating around $100,000 in AI usage. While **Wiz** has not confirmed that all nine incidents were carried out by the same attackers, many involved attempts to steal AI API keys. **Northflank** referenced **Wiz**'s research in its updates, suggesting a potential link between customer reports of unauthorized AI key usage and these broader attack patterns.  ### The Blue Report 2026 According to **The Blue Report 2026**, once attackers have valid credentials, only 37% of their actions are blocked. This report measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations in customer production environments, highlighting a sharp drop in prevention after initial access is gained with valid credentials. [Get the report](https://hubs.li/Q04sB3fb0)