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€54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

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Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#101

Post by JackSlateur »

827a wrote: post #21

I said this when this finding was originally posted and I'll say it again: This is by far the worst security incident Google has ever had, and that's why they aren't publicly or loudly responding to it. It's deeply embarrassing. They can't fix it without breaking customer workflows. They really, really want it to just go away and six months from now they'll complete their warning period to their enterprise contracts…

And this is why we invented segmentation, and everybody that are still not doing that are paying now and this is fine

Google is not the only culprit here;

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#102

Post by varispeed »

alibarber wrote: post #88

Forgive my ignorance - but what's the payoff for fraudsters in getting access to a generative AI service for a short-ish period of time, before they get cut off? With EC2 / GCC credentials, I could understand going all out on bitcoin mining - but what are they asking the AI to do here that's worth setting up some kind of botnet or automation to sift the internet for compromised keys?

If they work for hostile state, the payoff is destruction of economy and social contract. Damage here, damage there. It all adds up.

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#103

Post by imafish »

dabedee wrote: post #42

As others have said, this is a "feature" for Google, not a bug. There is no easy way to set a hard cap on billing on a project. I spent the better time of an hour trying to find it in the billing settings in GCP, only to land on reddit and figuring out that you could set a budget alert to trigger a Pub/Sub message, which triggers a Cloud Function to disable billing for the project. Insanity.

This is from my experience the same in AWS and Azure. I would love for a kill-switch if the usage goes above a critical threshold. 5 hours down time will not kill my app but a huge cloud bill might.

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#104

Post by lxgr »

alibarber wrote: post #88

Forgive my ignorance - but what's the payoff for fraudsters in getting access to a generative AI service for a short-ish period of time, before they get cut off? With EC2 / GCC credentials, I could understand going all out on bitcoin mining - but what are they asking the AI to do here that's worth setting up some kind of botnet or automation to sift the internet for compromised keys?

There are plenty of services offering AI inference at a discount. Some of these will be using your data for future distillation; others might be making use of bulk discounts and passing these through to a number of individual users (while taking on billing, support etc. risk) – and maybe some are just selling tokens falling off the back of a truck?

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#105

Post by rtkwe »

Maxious wrote: post #98
benterix wrote: post #90

> We had a budget alert (€80) and a cost anomaly alert, both of which triggered with a delay of a few hours > By the time we reacted, costs were already around €28,000 > The final amount settled at €54,000+ due to delayed cost reporting So much for the folks defending these three companies that refused to provide hard spending cap ("but you can set the budget", "you are doing it wrong if you worry about billing", "ha…

> The Gemini API supports monthly spend caps at both the billing account tier and project levels. These controls are designed to protect your account from unexpected overages, and the ecosystem to ensure service availability https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#project-spend-...

The problem is it's specific to that API and defaults to uncapped so people who aren't using it and haven't heard about the issues with the Firebase API keys probably won't have set them.

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#106

Post by [deleted] »

alibarber wrote: post #88

Forgive my ignorance - but what's the payoff for fraudsters in getting access to a generative AI service for a short-ish period of time, before they get cut off? With EC2 / GCC credentials, I could understand going all out on bitcoin mining - but what are they asking the AI to do here that's worth setting up some kind of botnet or automation to sift the internet for compromised keys?

[deleted]

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#107

Post by Maxious »

comrade1234 wrote: post #68

Can you pre-load money into your account and have that be used until it's zero, at which time you have to load more? Deepseek does it this way.

> When your Prepay credit balance on the billing account hits $0, all API keys in all projects linked to that billing account will stop working simultaneously. Prepay credits apply only to Gemini API usage costs; you can't use them to pay for other Google Cloud services.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#prepay

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#108

Post by Maxious »

ok123456 wrote: post #71
comrade1234 wrote: post #68

Can you pre-load money into your account and have that be used until it's zero, at which time you have to load more? Deepseek does it this way.

No GCP is not prepay.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#prepay

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#109

Post by LelouBil »

alibarber wrote: post #88

Forgive my ignorance - but what's the payoff for fraudsters in getting access to a generative AI service for a short-ish period of time, before they get cut off? With EC2 / GCC credentials, I could understand going all out on bitcoin mining - but what are they asking the AI to do here that's worth setting up some kind of botnet or automation to sift the internet for compromised keys?

Totally speculating here, but maybe they provide some sort of LLM as a service, and they rotate stolen API keys in the background so they don't have to pay anything ?

Or they use the LLMs for criminal purposes (like automated social engineering) and so the API key can't be traced to their personal info (but they could also use a local model for this, so I don't know).

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

#110

Post by time0ut »

It is scary building on the public cloud as a solo dev or small team. No real safety net, possibly unbounded costs, etc. A large portion of each personal project I do is spent thinking about how to prevent unexpected costs, detect and limit them, and react to them. I used to just chuck everything onto a droplet or VPS, but a lot of the projects I am doing lately need services from Google or AWS. I tend to prefer GCP at this point because at least I can programmatically disconnect the billing account when they get around to tripping the alert.
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