Wiz’s Customer Incident Response Team investigated multiple intrusions into Google Cloud Platform (GCP), where attackers linked projects they controlled to victims’ billing accounts, funding unauthorized AI use that generated charges of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The attackers used sponsored Google search ads to impersonate Google login pages and capture passwords and multi-factor authentication codes. With stolen privileged credentials, they linked their own projects to victims’ billing accounts. The AI workloads ran in those external projects, so victims paid the bill but could not see the prompts or model responses.
For organizations whose administrators find cloud consoles through search, the billing record and the workloads it paid for sit on opposite sides of a tenant boundary. Investigations limited to visible victim projects can miss both where the AI activity ran and what it produced.
From Phishing to LLMjacking: Threat Actors Targeting Cloud Billing Accounts for LLM Usage | Wiz Blog
How a single Google Search ad click leads to credential theft, hijacking of cloud billing account, and hundreds of thousands of dollars incurred in unauthorized AI API usage