App hoster Railway attackers ran up US$740,000 on stolen AI keys

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AI model gateway OpenRouter declines refunds.

Attackers who broke into application hosting platform Railway last month ran up an estimated US$740,000 ($1.07 million) in unauthorised usage on artificial intelligence provider keys stolen from its customers, the company said in an incident post-mortem.

Railway's incident report said the intruder obtained and decrypted stored environment variables for at most 1.85 per5cent of workspaces, or about 100,000 of them.

The haul also included linked-account tokens, among them GitHub OAuth tokens, for 1852 users.

Database logs showed the attacker ran queries that picked out variables whose names matched AI provider keys, and favoured customers with large numbers of stored variables, Railway said.

Amazon Web Services and Google have begun refunds under their fraud policies, while OpenAI and SpaceXSI are reviewing claims case by case, Railway said.

Meanwhile, OpenRouter is enforcing the no-refund policy in its terms of service, and Anthropic was still in discussions when the report was published.

The intrusion began on October 20, when the attacker exploited a previously unknown flaw in Railway's build infrastructure to read files on a host virtual machine and take a build credential.

With the code in hand, the attacker found a wrongly configured identity binding in Railway's deployment pipeline, and from there reached a machine holding a credential that could decrypt customer variables.

The company described the response as a "contest of agent speed", saying evidence which it did not publish indicated the attacker used abliterated AI models, meaning ones with their safety restrictions removed.

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