Northflank discloses platform breach exposing customers' AI API keys

Northflank, a cloud platform that allows developers to deploy and manage applications, containers, databases and AI applications, disclosed on October 30 that a security breach had led to unauthorized use of customers' stored AI API keys.

The company's status page told customers to assume all environment variables had been decrypted and to disable or rotate all keys.

What happened

Northflank is a cloud platform that allows developers to deploy and manage applications, containers, databases, and AI applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

The company disclosed the incident on October 30, warning customers to immediately rotate their environment variables and API keys after receiving a threat alert from cloud security company Wiz.

According to Northflank's published incident timeline, Wiz warned them about the breach at 11:43 UTC on October 30, which the company's engineers reviewed one minute later.

Northflank quickly responded with a network policy patch, followed by additional patches at 12:50 UTC and 13:05 UTC.

The company also requested assistance from Wiz's incident response team.

Impact

Northflank later confirmed that multiple customers had reported unauthorized use of AI API keys stored on the platform.

The company's own status page states that users have reported unauthorised use of AI API keys supplied to the Northflank platform.

The company has not disclosed how attackers gained access to its systems, how many customers were affected, or whether attackers stole or abused credentials other than the reported AI API keys.

Security researchers at Wiz identified at least nine security incidents affecting AI development platforms during the month, including Northflank, Railway, OpenCode, Warp, and Lightning AI.

Response

As part of its response, Northflank enabled credential rotation for PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis.

The company also enabled audit logs for all customers, including those using free accounts, to help them investigate any 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.

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.

Lessons for security leaders

Stored AI provider keys are attractive targets because attackers can resell or exploit them through LLMJacking, which involves using stolen credentials to access AI models using another organization's API keys, generating massive API charges or allowing the stolen access to be resold.

Security teams relying on shared developer platforms should treat any disclosed platform breach as a signal to rotate secrets across workloads, secret groups and global secrets rather than waiting for a confirmed list of affected accounts, since Northflank itself has not disclosed how many customers were affected.