From Phishing to LLMjacking: Threat Actors Targeting Cloud Billing Accounts for LLM Usage

Threat actors are conducting phishing campaigns via malicious Google Search ads to steal Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credentials and multi-factor authentication codes. Using compromised accounts, attackers gain access to GCP environments, disable organizational policy controls, and link external attacker-controlled projects to the victim's billing accounts. This allows them to abuse the victim's financial resources for large-scale, unauthorized Large Language Model (LLM) inference through Google's Gemini API, resulting in massive, undetected API charges. The attackers also employ geographic blending and demote legitimate administrators to evade detection and maintain persistence.

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