Leaked AWS IAM Key Used to Steal and Resell Paid Bedrock AI Access

FortiGuard Labs documented an LLMjacking intrusion in which attackers used a leaked, long-lived AWS IAM access key with AdministratorAccess to create a new IAM user, subscribe to premium foundation models through AWS Marketplace, and run inference charges against the victim organization. The financial exposure can be substantial: abuse of Claude 2.x may exceed $46,000 per day, while Claude 3 Opus usage may exceed $100,000 per day.

The actors may create Amazon Bedrock service-specific API keys to conceal the activity and resell stolen model access through low-cost chatbot subscriptions promoted on Telegram and Discord. Because requests are made with valid AWS credentials, the abuse can resemble legitimate usage; organizations should eliminate long-lived privileged access keys in favor of short-lived assumed-role credentials, enable organization-wide CloudTrail and Bedrock invocation logging, and investigate new Bedrock activity alongside identity, IP, enumeration, and access-denied anomalies.