Incident: A leaked key ran up 82,314 dollars

Module 13 · Incident file · About 25 minutes

What happened

On 3 March 2026 Jessica Lyons reported in The Register on a three-developer startup in Mexico, not named in the article (The Register, "Dev stunned by $82K Gemini bill after unknown API key thief goes to town", 3 March 2026). Its Google Cloud API key was compromised between 11 and 12 February 2026. In 48 hours, someone else's requests ran up 82,314.44 US dollars, mostly on Gemini 3 Pro Image and Gemini 3 Pro Text. The startup's normal spend was about 180 dollars a month.

The developer deleted the key, disabled the Gemini APIs and rotated credentials. He told The Register: "If Google attempts to enforce even a third of this amount, our company goes bankrupt." According to the article, a Google representative cited the shared responsibility model, under which customers protect their own credentials. Google declined to say whether it would make the developer pay. The article does not say how the key leaked.

A week earlier, on 25 February 2026, Joe Leon of Truffle Security had published how such keys reach Gemini (Truffle Security, "Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules", 25 February 2026). Scanning the November 2025 Common Crawl, a public archive of web pages, Truffle found 2,863 live Google API keys that could call Gemini. Truffle reported it to Google on 21 November 2025; Google first judged it intended behaviour, then reclassified it as a bug, and on 13 January 2026 as "Single-Service Privilege Escalation, READ". The Register does not say whether the startup's key was among the 2,863. Google's spokesperson told The Register that it has "implemented proactive measures to detect and block leaked API keys that attempt to access the Gemini API."