The rise of LLMJacking: how threat actors monetize compromised cloud and model resources

In multiple LLMJacking incidents Mandiant responded to in 2026, threat actors bypassed the front-end interface to directly hijack enterprises' large language model back-end resources. Victim organizations spanned the finance, retail, technology and transportation industries in North America, South America and Asia-Pacific. Fraudulent cloud bills exceeded $100,000 per day, and some organizations accumulated bills of $1 million before access was revoked. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) found that this underground ecosystem has already developed a division of labor: one group of attackers handles initial intrusion, while another operates an illegal routing gateway called LLM Mixer, proxying, aggregating and reselling stolen LLM access. The main intrusion vectors are exposed or stolen cloud identity tokens and publicly exposed LLM endpoints; attackers also exploited CVE-2026-40217 in the LiteLLM gateway to escalate an ordinary Virtual Key to PROXY_ADMIN administrator credentials. The report includes audit log detection rules for AWS, Azure and GCP, as well as mitigation recommendations such as IAM least privilege, key management, gateway patching and budget alerts.