5 ms·
Stolen Gemini API key racks up $82,000 in 48 hours
- k8sToGo 8mo agoThis is one of the main reasons I prefer to use openrouter instead. It's prepaid.
- laszlojamf 8mo agoSlightly unrelated question: how would you spend $82k on prompts in 48 hours? Just phishing?
- qmarchi 8mo agoOpenClaw or a bunch of agents.
- tim-tday 8mo agoWhic run on computers somewhere. So Google has a record of the source of the fraudulent calls.
- masfuerte 8mo agoI'd guess they are selling access to other people somehow. Like it used to be the case that a stolen phone would rack up enormous overseas call charges until it was reported and disabled.
- bakugo 8mo agoIf your goal is to just burn as much money as possible, as fast as possible, simply spamming expensive image/video generation requests would probably do the trick, if the key's rate limits are high enough. There's also a practice that primarily seems to occur in china where stolen keys are resold via proxy services. A single key can provide access to thousands of users, racking up costs very fast (again, assuming the rate limits are high enough).
- user34283 8mo agoIs there a way to limit spending on Google Cloud? As far as I saw you can only set up billing alerts, no hard limit.
- rustyhancock 8mo agoWould be very disappointing if that's true, but I've not known Google not to find ways to disappoint.
- lima 8mo agoIt's true, neither AWS nor GCP support spending limits. Only alerting.
- sofixa 8mo agoThat's because you pay for stuff like storage. If you had a spending limit, they'd have to delete your data to stop your spend.
- Iolaum 8mo agoIf only there was a way to pause all the other stuff and only let storage to keep costing you ...
- sofixa 8mo agoThere is, and it would cause an outage while still not achieving the supposed goal of not going over budget. You don't want to be killing your customer's production over potential misconfigurations/forgotten budgets. Especially when you'd continue to bill them for the storage and other static things like IPs. It's so much easier for them to have support wave accidental overuses.
- delfinom 8mo agoIf only we had the technology to exempt storage from spending limits.
- crimsonnoodle58 8mo agoIs this part of the keys didn't use to be a secret, now they are issue with google? [1] If so they have a good case on their hands. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156925
- voidUpdate 8mo agoThis might have something to do with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156925
- latexr 8mo agoContents of the blog are themselves written by LLM. https://github.com/coollabsio/llmhorrors.com/blob/main/CLAUDE.md#3-write-the-post-body https://github.com/coollabsio/llmhorrors.com/blob/main/CLAUD... The whole website seems to be focused on promoting the author and their projects more than sharing the information. Just link to the original. https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1reqtvi/82000_in_48_hours_from_stolen_gemini_api_key_my/ https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1reqtvi/82000_... Posted to HN twice recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184182
- amelius 8mo agoWhat do you expect from a website named llmhorrors.com?
- latexr 8mo agoI would expect it to not be written by an LLM. Molly White didn’t run Web3 is Going Great on the blockchain. https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
- Daviey 8mo agoFalse equivalence, Tesla also does not run their website from a Model S.
- jermaustin1 8mo agoThe joke is, LLM Horrors is anti-LLM, Web3 is Going Just Great is anti Web3. The equivalent for Tesla would be Tesla putting a ICE inside their model 2 if they didn't believe in EVs.
- gchamonlive 8mo agoAnd looking at her main website https://www.citationneeded.news/ https://www.citationneeded.news/ there is a tip jar but it doesn't accept crypto. I was expecting her to take at least the major coins like Ada, Eth and BTC, but she's consistent with her views.
- vincnetas 8mo agothe tokens are not stolen. they are public. how can you steal public tokens? its googles blunder that they allowed public tokens to be used for paid functionality.
- commandersaki 8mo agoIt is used to exchange goods and services without the consent of the owner. Kind of like picking up a wallet full of cash off the ground (with or without) identification.
- LeonidBugaev 8mo agoThankfully Google has some basic protection for it. I accidentally commited my google api token, as part of some OTEL trace JSON file, and within a few minutes my key was automatically locked by google, and marked as leaked (with exact link pointing where it has happened).
- mickael-kerjean 8mo ago"some basic protection" it wasn't always like this. A few years back you could easily get api keys for any web service by typing certain keywords on github and that included all google APIs, but since the Microsoft acquisition it's not as simple anymore....
- mjbonanno 8mo agoOof, $82k in 48 hours is brutal. Makes me even more glad I run everything local where possible.
- neom 8mo agoWhat are you running locally? ClawdBot by chance...?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- arashsadrieh 8mo ago[flagged]
- post-it 8mo agoMy understanding is that AWS budget actions also operate on a delay. I love using AWS at work but I'm never giving it my personal credit card as long as I can't turn off auto-billing.
- Traubenfuchs 8mo agoI understand that cloud resources and automatically stopping them beyond a certain spend is problematic and challenging in many ways, e.g. do you just destroy provisioned computer, storage, data? But for those stupid API keys the corporations have zero excuse not to have configurable limits with a sensible default.
- Addono 8mo agoYeah, right... > Conclusion: Always set billing caps and alerts on cloud API keys. Sadly, way easier said than done in the case of GCP. Been a proper reason for me to avoid GCP deployments with LLM use-cases for smaller projects. I remember looking into this a while back assuming it would be a sane feature to expect. But for some reason it's surprisingly non-trivial with GCP to set budgets. Especially if the only thing you want is a Gemini API key with finite spending. IIRC you could either set (rate) limits on quotas, but quotas are extremely granular (like, per region per model) meaning you need to both set tons of values and understand which quotas to relax. Or alternatively do some bubblegum-and-ducktape like solution where you build an event-driven pipeline to react to cost increases in your own project. I understand that exact budgets are hard to enforce in real-time, especially for their more complex infra offerings. However, (1) even if it's not exactly real-time, but instead enforced every hour that's already going to go a long way, and (2) PAYG LLM usage is billed rather linearly by the amount of tokens you use, so if there would be an easy way to set a dollar-amount and have that expressed as budgets that would already get you part of the way there. Anyway, the current state of GCP budgeting it makes me avoid it for production usage until I'm ready to commit spending significant effort to harden it. For all small projects, the free tier tokens are a safe bet, but their extremely low rate-limits make them rarely a good fit.
- panos_news 8mo agoYeah, it's an utter joke and a UX/UI crime that has been going unpunished for way too long. Wonder what all those geniuses are doing.
- impure 8mo agoBilling caps? Google? Ha ha ha ha... OK, I'm sad now.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 8mo agoYeah, I couldn't figure out how to set billing caps on the gemini API. Here's what the chatbot said: Me: Help me cap gemini API request costs ... limit total billing for this project to max $100 a month GC: Hello! While it's not possible to set a hard spending cap on Gemini API requests, you can set up billing alerts to monitor your costs and avoid surprises. Me: How to set hard budget limit tied to billing account GC: Based on your account information, it is not possible to set a hard budget limit that automatically stops charges for a billing account. Me: How to set quota for gemini api? GC: Sorry, I'm not able to answer that question.
- tim-tday 8mo agoLet me guess. Leaked due to improper handling of the key.
- opsmeter 8mo agoThis reads like an “incident without guardrails”: per-project caps/quotas, anomaly alerts (minutes), env-split keys, and an automated kill-switch should be defaults for usage-based APIs. Billing emails are post-mortems.