Google Cloud: LLMJacking hijacks cloud and model access, fraudulent bills top $100,000 a day

[Google Cloud] Mandiant responded in 2026 to multiple incidents in which threat actors hijacked enterprise access to large language models (LLMs), a tactic known as LLMJacking, according to Google Cloud. The intrusions spanned multiple cloud and LLM providers and affected organizations in North America, South America and Asia Pacific across financial services, retail, technology and transportation. Unlike the gradual resource consumption of cryptojacking, LLMJacking can generate large spikes in fraudulent cloud charges within hours; according to Google Cloud, fraudulent charges tied to resource consumption exceeded $100,000 in a single day in individual incidents, with cumulative charges at some organizations reaching $1 million before access was revoked. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it identified financially motivated threat clusters operating from multiple regions and is tracking a division of labor between actors establishing initial access and operators of downstream monetization infrastructure known as LLM Mixers, which it described as illicit routing gateways that proxy, aggregate and resell unauthorized LLM access. Google Cloud said the dominant initial access vector was exposed or stolen cloud identity tokens, including IAM credentials, service account keys, GitHub personal access tokens and active session tokens.