Search: “api-key-theft”

19 stories

DomainAll Cyber AIWindow24h 3d 7d 30d AllIn the wild Important only Show duplicates

CategoryAll

SeverityAll critical 0 high 0 medium 0 low 0 info 0

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

Hackers Use Passkey-Themed Phishing to Hijack Microsoft 365 Accounts and Steal Cloud Data

Microsoft reports passkey-themed phishing campaigns hijacking Microsoft 365 accounts via AiTM and device-code flows, then exfiltrating cloud data.

Microsoft researchers identified passkey-themed phishing across cloud intrusions observed since May 2026, where callers posing as IT support direct victims to lookalike sign-in pages. The flows include adversary-in-the-middle phishing and device-code authentication, letting attackers capture usable sessions even when MFA succeeds, followed by rogue MFA registration for persistence. Attackers enumerate tenants via Microsoft Graph and collect SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange data at rates below 1,000 items per hour; lure domains include passkeyhelpdesk.com and setupmypasskey.com.

Cyber Security Newsupdated 14:54 UTC · 7h agofirst Sep 10, 13:23 UTC · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 9 sources

Attackers Steal METR API Key and Consume AI Credits Worth About $600,000

METR disclosed attackers stole an API key and burned about $600,000 in inference credits, plus a second probing campaign against its infrastructure.

METR, the AI model evaluation non-profit, disclosed two 2026 security incidents. In March, attackers found a publicly exposed EC2 instance behind a fail-open authentication bug, prompted an agent to reveal its API key, added SSH persistence, and consumed roughly $600,000 in inference credits over three weeks. In May, a likely financially motivated actor systematically probed METR's public infrastructure using agents for vulnerability discovery, credential stuffing, OAuth token grants and staff phishing, with no confirmed access to non-public data.

The Hacker NewsSep 1, 09:05 UTC · 15d agoData breach in the wild

Attackers Steal METR API Key and Burn $600,000 in AI Credits

Attackers used a stolen METR API key for three weeks, burning $600,000 in AI model credits before the abuse was stopped.

Attackers obtained a METR API key and used it without authorization for roughly three weeks, consuming AI model credits worth $600,000. The incident, reported by Infosecurity Magazine, shows how stolen cloud AI credentials can drive rapid, high-cost abuse. It underscores the need for API key hygiene, usage monitoring, and spend alerts on AI accounts.

Infosecurity MagazineSep 1, 14:30 UTC · 15d agoAI safety & security in the wild

This Key Will Self-Destruct: An Open Standard for Revocable API Keys

SecurityWeek opinion piece proposes ORKS, an open standard adding issuer prefixes, discovery files, and unauthenticated revocation endpoints to make leaked API keys quickly revocable.

The article argues that plain API keys leak frequently yet lack any standardized revocation mechanism, unlike OAuth tokens which gained RFC 7009 revocation in 2013, and that GitHub's Secret Scanning Partner Program solves this only in a proprietary, invite-only way. The author proposes ORKS (Open Revocable Key Standard), with a draft spec on GitHub, built on four parts: keys embedding their issuer domain in a fixed prefix format, a discoverable /.well-known/api-key-config JSON file, unauthenticated revocation by possession of the full key, and declared constraints such as IP allowlists, expiry, scopes, and mTLS. An optional quarantine mode inspired by Toyota's andon cord restricts a reported key to read-only and throttled operation for a default 24-hour window before automatic revocation. The piece frames AI agents as making this urgent, since agents hold many credentials, can exfiltrate them via prompt injection, and can leak secrets into logs at machine speed.

SecurityWeekSep 9, 10:00 UTC · 7d agoTools1

AI Model Evaluator METR Hit by Credential Theft, Probing

Threat actors stole an API key from AI evaluator METR and consumed $600,000 in public model credits; a second campaign probed its infrastructure.

Dark Reading reports that AI model evaluation nonprofit METR suffered a credential theft in which attackers obtained an API key that led to consumption of $600,000 worth of public AI model inference credits. METR also faced a separate sustained campaign in which financially motivated actors probed its publicly accessible infrastructure and attempted initial access via credential stuffing and OAuth token grants. No evidence of access to sensitive information was reported in either incident.

Dark ReadingSep 1, 20:13 UTC · 15d agoData breach in the wild

Attacker stole a METR API key, used $600K worth of credits, and no one noticed for weeks

Attackers stole a METR API key via an exposed agent-run EC2 instance and consumed about $600,000 in public model credits over three weeks.

AI evaluation nonprofit METR disclosed two incidents. In March 2026, a fail-open bug in a vibe-coded app disabled authentication on a publicly accessible EC2 instance; an attacker prompted the running agent to reveal a model provider API key, added an SSH key for persistence, and consumed roughly $600,000 in free public-model credits over three weeks without being noticed. In May 2026, attackers probed METR's public infrastructure using agents, automated vulnerability discovery, credential stuffing, OAuth token attempts, and phishing; a separately exposed read-only SQL mechanism found by a bug bounty hunter risked leaking unpublished evaluation data, but no access to non-public data was confirmed.

The Register · SecuritySep 1, 20:45 UTC · 15d agoData breach in the wild1

ClickFix moves into the browser: Cryptocurrency theft with Google-hosted C2

Talos tracks a crypto-theft campaign abusing the Google Visualization API for C2, using browser-based ClickFix lures to inject web-skimmer JavaScript.

Criminal actors convinced targets to paste JavaScript into Chrome's address bar or install it in the Tampermonkey extension, injecting a web skimmer into sessions on two cryptocurrency trading websites; Tampermonkey also provides persistence. Since March 2026 the campaign retrieved obfuscated scripts via the Google Visualization API from public Google Sheets documents, hooking the fetch API and replacing cryptocurrency deposit addresses in responses and the clipboard. Lures pose as leaked reports of a nonexistent API flaw at cryptocurrency swap services and spread via Telegram, DarkForums, and paste sites since early October 2025. Talos warns the legitimate-service-abuse techniques could enable wider supply-chain attacks on e-commerce and customer-facing systems.

Cisco TalosSep 8, 10:00 UTC · 8d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Launch Mass Credential Theft Attacks in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud reports attackers used autonomous AI agents to steal thousands of credentials including 23,800 secrets in a sub-six-hour campaign.

Google Cloud threat intelligence observed financially motivated attackers compromising cloud infrastructure and using AI coding agents guided by written playbook files to scan, harvest and rotate credentials within six hours. An exposed C2 dashboard for a framework called Recon organized and validated more than 23,800 stolen secrets, including API keys for cloud and AI services. Related activity includes UNC6780 publishing the trojanized tiktoken_mcp package on PyPI to target CI/CD tokens and the DUSTMAKER stealer hiding in .claude, .vscode and .cursor workspace directories.

Cyber Security NewsSep 9, 12:47 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

From Infostealer Log to Marketplace Listing: A Technical Walkthrough of the Credential Theft Pipeline

Cyble walkthrough maps how infostealer logs move from endpoint infection through aggregation and enrichment to dark web credential marketplace sales.

Cyble breaks the credential theft pipeline into stages: infostealer execution harvesting browser credential stores, cookies, session tokens, crypto wallets, and FTP configurations; aggregation of stealer logs via C2 panels into bundled archives; parsing and enrichment against previously leaked datasets; and final listing on dark web marketplaces. Enrichment adds employer and role context that raises prices and enables credential stuffing across reused passwords. The report advises SOC teams to monitor stealer logs and marketplace chatter early rather than waiting for breach alerts.

CybleSep 10, 10:45 UTC · 6d agoMalware1

Stealing AI Reasoning Traces

Researchers demonstrate a decryption jailbreak that extracts encrypted reasoning traces from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google LLM APIs via weaker sibling models.

The paper exploits the fact that encrypted chain-of-thought blocks returned by LLM providers are interchangeable across sessions, users, and models within a provider's ecosystem. Injecting an encrypted trace into a weaker, less-safeguarded model from the same provider forces it to output the trace in plaintext, bypassing anti-distillation mechanisms. Decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories recovered 367 PII artifacts and 182 credentials, showing large-scale private data leakage. The flaw also enables hidden hazardous information disclosure and invisible prompt injections embedded in encrypted blocks; mitigations were proposed after responsible disclosure.

Schneier on SecuritySep 8, 10:20 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO OnlineSep 15, 08:25 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Hackers Abuse Google Sheets as C2 in ClickFix Attacks to Steal Cryptocurrency

Cisco Talos tracks a ClickFix crypto-theft campaign using Google Sheets as C2 to swap deposit addresses in Chrome.

Cisco Talos uncovered a cryptocurrency theft campaign that abuses Google Sheets and the Google Visualization API as a covert C2 channel, delivering obfuscated JavaScript into victims' Chrome browser sessions via ClickFix-style social engineering. Victims are lured with a fake "API Logic Flaw" report promising 25-38% bonuses on SimpleSwap and SwapZone swaps; the injected payload acts as a browser-based web skimmer that replaces deposit addresses, overrides the fetch API, and hijacks the clipboard. Later variants use the legitimate Tampermonkey extension with a user script for persistence without OS-level compromise. Talos identified 49 Bitcoin wallets, with 24 reused addresses receiving about 0.159 BTC (~$10,000) before mixing through more than 3,000 addresses.

GBHackersSep 9, 06:22 UTC · 7d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI

Analysis of Vercel and Composio breaches shows stolen OAuth tokens, not phishing email, now open Google Workspace attacks — a path authorized AI agents follow.

The author analyzes the Vercel and Composio breaches as the same OAuth-first attack chain run twice: a stolen OAuth token, obtained via a compromised supplier, becomes the entry point rather than email. These tokens survive password resets, are hard to observe, and let attackers read Gmail and Drive data, take over accounts, and pivot laterally using stored credentials and password-reset magic links. The piece warns that authorized AI agents with overbroad OAuth grants can unintentionally traverse the same path — accessing inboxes, reading sensitive content, and exfiltrating data downstream — without any malicious actor or compromised credential.

Help Net Security05:00 UTC · 16h agoResearch in the wild

Exposed AWS Access Key Linked to Data Breach Affecting 1500+ UK Charities

CRM provider Beacon says a compromised AWS access key likely caused a data breach affecting more than 1,500 UK charities.

Beacon, a UK CRM provider serving the charity sector, disclosed that an exposed AWS access key was the likely root cause of a data breach. The incident affected data belonging to more than 1,500 UK charities. The company said the compromised cloud credential enabled the unauthorized access; specific record volumes and data types are not detailed in the report.

Infosecurity MagazineAug 13, 15:30 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Data breach in the wild

Passkey-themed social engineering leads to identity and cloud compromise

Microsoft tracks ongoing cloud intrusions where passkey-themed helpdesk lures enable AiTM credential theft, MFA persistence, and SharePoint data theft.

Microsoft Security Research is tracking active cloud-based intrusions, observed since May 2026, that begin with helpdesk impersonation calls and SMS lures urging urgent passkey, MFA, or SSO updates. The lures lead to adversary-in-the-middle phishing or device-code authentication flows that capture credentials and session tokens or grant actor access, after which the actors add authentication methods, conduct Microsoft Graph reconnaissance, and download SharePoint and OneDrive content via REST APIs. Phishing domains embed victim organization names as subdomains (e.g., contoso.add-passkey[.]com), are often registered with Nicenic, and go operational within hours. Microsoft advises revoking sessions and removing unauthorized authentication methods for confirmed compromises.

Microsoft Security BlogSep 9, 17:41 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild2

Microsoft Tracks MacSync Stealer by Its Behavior, Not Its Domains

Microsoft correlates over 30 rotating domains to track MacSync Stealer, which steals passwords, SSH keys, wallets and AWS credentials.

Microsoft Defender Experts tracked MacSync Stealer, a macOS information stealer, by analyzing recurring behaviors rather than individual domains, linking over 30 domains to the campaign. The infection chain uses the ClickFix social engineering technique, tricking victims into pasting commands in Terminal, then uses curl, AppleScript, and native macOS tools to deploy the payload. The stealer targets Keychain data, browser passwords and cookies, SSH keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes configurations, and Ledger and Trezor wallet data, staging data before exfiltration via chunked HTTP PUT requests. RST Cloud identified rapid C2 infrastructure replacement after initial public disclosure.

Security AffairsAug 19, 08:57 UTC · 28d agoMalware

Has anybody seen my keys? A key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security

Oxide's RFD 0301 proposes a rack-level key hierarchy using Shamir secret sharing and a trust quorum to protect data-at-rest keys.

Oxide's request for discussion (RFD 0301) lays out a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security, deriving keys from a rack secret protected by Shamir secret sharing across a trust quorum of sleds, with keys exchanged over authenticated sprockets sessions. The document maps which keys protect control-plane data, metrics, Crucible extents, and authentication tokens, and defines open questions on key lifecycle, locality, and compromise handling. Future work includes sealing shares with the root of trust so an attacker would need to steal K whole sleds to reconstruct the rack secret.

Hacker News · securitySep 7, 02:14 UTC · 9d agoResearch HN 52↑ · 3 comments

Attackers Exploit PaperCut Flaws to Steal Credentials From Schools and Universities

Attackers exploit newly disclosed PaperCut auth bypass CVE-2026-81578 and RCE CVE-2026-82078 to steal credentials from schools and universities in the US and Europe.

Arctic Wolf observed threat actors chaining CVE-2026-81578 (authentication bypass) and CVE-2026-82078 (remote code execution) in PaperCut to execute commands, perform reconnaissance, and create privileged accounts on servers at K-12 schools and universities in the US and Europe. Post-exploitation includes registry hive collection with lsa_collect.exe delivered via certutil, Meterpreter Java payloads from 194.180.48.134, and searches of PaperCut config files for passwords, LDAP bindings, and tokens. Stolen logins could provide a pathway into other critical systems across compromised environments.

The Hacker NewsSep 5, 07:31 UTC · 11d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-81578 CVE-2026-820781

Fake IT Calls Target Executives in Microsoft 365 Data Theft and Extortion Attacks

Arctic Wolf tracks PREY-0058, a vishing and AitM token-theft crew targeting Microsoft 365 executives for data theft and extortion.

Arctic Wolf disclosed a widespread data theft and extortion cluster, PREY-0058, which overlaps with Mandiant's UNC6671 and possibly the Pink/Cinder extortion groups. Attackers impersonate IT help desk staff by phone, direct executives to authentication-themed lure domains, and run adversary-in-the-middle Microsoft 365 logins to harvest credentials, MFA approvals, and session tokens replayed via residential proxies such as NodeMaven. After access, they run discovery in SharePoint and Entra ID, then bulk-exfiltrate data from SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and Box before sending extortion demands. Targets are primarily US construction, healthcare, real estate, finance, and professional services organizations.

The Hacker NewsSep 7, 15:51 UTC · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1