If your app runs on Northflank, assume every key stored there is no longer private and replace it. The cloud platform told all customers this after a break-in on 30 October, and some of them have since found strangers running up usage on their AI provider keys.
On Monday, Northflank said its running workloads were not affected and that it has seen no sign the attacker got into customer data. The company believes the attacker was shut out within an hour of the first alert. What the attacker took, it says, was secrets held in its control plane, the part of the platform that stores the settings and keys for every customer.
What Northflank has said so far
The first warning came from the security firm Wiz at 11:43 UTC on 30 October, according to the incident page on Northflank’s status site. Patches to network policy went out at 12:02 and 12:50 UTC. By 13:58 UTC the page was telling customers to assume all environment variables had been decrypted, and by 23:38 UTC it confirmed that users were reporting unauthorised use of AI API keys.
Environment variables are where most apps keep their passwords, cloud credentials and API keys, which is why the advice covers more than AI keys. Northflank’s latest update says to start with AI provider keys, then cloud credentials, payment keys, private keys and database passwords. Customers on dedicated or forward-deployed control planes are not affected, the company says.
Northflank has also revoked access tokens, sessions, version-control integrations and cross-account cloud roles where it could, so users may have to sign in again and reconnect those links. It patched a vulnerability it lists as CVE-2026-98432 across its servers, including customer clusters that still have an active connection to it. Independent forensic auditors are reviewing the attack. A root cause analysis will follow once the findings are confirmed, and the company has not yet said how the attacker got in or how many customers were hit.
Part of a wider run of attacks
Northflank’s own page points to Wiz’s “Black October” report, which counts at least nine AI developer platforms that disclosed incidents in October. Wiz found no single bug linking them. What they share is that the attackers went after stored environment variables, especially ones that unlock AI services.
The report shows why speed matters. Wiz traced two stolen Amazon Bedrock keys that were tested within 30 minutes of being taken, then used heavily several days later, making roughly 2.5 million calls and an estimated $100,000 of usage between them. It also found the keys being checked by sites that sell cut-price access to AI models, though it could not tie those sites to the original break-ins.
What to do today
Revoke each old key with the company that issued it, create a new one, update it in Northflank and your running services, then check usage and billing for odd activity. Where you can, set a spending cap or limit each new key to the models and regions you use. Northflank now offers one-click secret rotation for its PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, MinIO and RabbitMQ add-ons, and has turned on audit logs for every account, free ones included.
Anyone who suspects misuse of an AI key should contact the AI provider as well as Northflank support. The incident page is where the root cause analysis will appear.
