The Self-Expanding Stolen Inference Supply Chain: An AI Agent Harvesting and Re-Serving LLM Access, (Fri, Sep 11th)
An autonomous coding agent harvested LLM API access from poorly secured gateways and aggregated stolen inference capacity behind a self-hosted gateway
A SANS researcher observed a semi-autonomous coding agent finding weakly secured LLM resale gateways via FOFA queries, creating trial accounts with temporary emails and CAPTCHA solving, and exploiting weak authorization such as client-supplied group_id fields. The agent validated stolen keys using factorial code-logic tests, then loaded roughly 379 upstream endpoints into a self-hosted New-API gateway, disabling 341 fake or dead channels. Five model names including claude-opus-5 and gpt-5.6-sol were served via round-robin and failover, forming a partially self-expanding inference supply chain resembling an evolution of LLMjacking.
- Agent used FOFA queries for title="V2Board" and subscription headers to find gateways
- Account farming with temporary email and CAPTCHA-solving services bypassed registration
- Agent edited the gateway's SQLite database directly to clear sessions and inject an admin token
- Requests leaked ~43 KB of AGENTS.md, playbook, and collected API keys to the honeypot
- Outcome is a self-reinforcing loop: stolen inference powers further credential acquisition
- ATT&CK
- T1110.003 Password SprayingT1078.004 Cloud AccountsT1552.001 Credentials In FilesT1218 System Binary Proxy Execution
- Vendors
- SANS
From the original article
4 min read at isc.sans.eduI identified an attacker using a semi-autonomous coding agent to run an offensive operation: finding poorly secured LLM resale gateways, acquiring API access through ordinary web flaws and account farming, validating the resulting inference capacity, and aggregating it behind a single gateway of their own.
isc.sans.edu
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