METR breach: LLM key abuse burned $600,000 in three weeks

An attacker spent three weeks inside a METR researcher's cloud instance and burned roughly $600,000 in inference credits without touching sensitive data. A fail-open bug disabled Google auth on a vibe-coded agent app holding a key to METR's general-access account.

• Attack lasted three weeks and cost about $600,000 in inference credits
• Cause was a fail-open bug that disabled Google auth on the agent
• Attacker likely found the host via certificate transparency logs
• The pattern is called LLMjacking: stolen compute converts to value immediately