LLMjacking: The New Threat Draining Your Cloud Budget

Imagine walking into the office, sipping your black coffee and discovering your cloud bill has ballooned to $50000 a day. No new projects, no performance spikes just an inexplicable surge in compute usage. You scramble for answers, but it’s already too late. Someone has hijacked your cloud infrastructure to power their AI models and you are footing the bill. This isn’t fiction, its LLMjacking and its happening right now.

How Does LLMjacking Happen?

It all starts with a weak link, an unpatched vulnerability, a misconfigured cloud instance, or leaked credentials like passwords or API keys. Attackers exploit these openings to access your environment, download large language models, and run them on your infrastructure.

But they don’t stop there. With a reverse proxy in place, they may even resell AI access to others, monetising the stolen compute power while you bear the operational and billing consequences. And because these deployments often mimic legitimate activity, they can go unnoticed for days if not weeks.

Security researchers discovered 12,000 API keys and passwords buried in datasets used to train public LLMs. Some of these credentials provided direct access to cloud environments. A mid-sized U.S. tech firm unknowingly hosted a language model for months. They only discovered it after receiving an AWS bill 15x their normal amount. No breach notification. No alerts. Just a financial shockwave.

According to a Gartner report, by 2026, 75% of organisations will unknowingly expose sensitive data via shadow AI and unmonitored machine learning models. And yet, most organisations still rely on fragmented security postures that weren’t designed for AI-era threats.

Shadow AI: The Threat You Can’t See

Sometimes, it’s not even an external attacker. An enthusiastic employee could spin up an AI model for experimentation, unknowingly creating shadow AI systems that exist outside your governance framework. Whether well intentioned or malicious, the result is the same: resource sprawl, security blind spots, and the risk of a breach. As Forbes highlights, the rise of Shadow AI usage in the workplace has amplified these risks, potentially exposing sensitive data and intellectual property to unauthorised access.

How Paramatrix Can Help

At Paramatrix, we specialise in helping organisations take back control of their cloud environments, secure AI workloads, and eliminate silent threats before they cause damage.

Here’s how we do it:

1. Cloud Configuration & Posture Assessment – We help you lock down weak configurations—open ports, excessive IAM permissions, over-provisioned storage, etc. Our posture assessments are aligned with benchmarks like CIS, NIST, and CSA, giving you full compliance confidence.

2. Shadow AI Detection & Governance – Using continuous visibility tools, we scan cloud instances for unauthorised LLMs or workloads and classify them based on risk. We also offer usage-based anomaly detection to spot unexpected compute spikes—before they hit your invoice.

3. Automated Vulnerability Management – We perform real-time scans of your workloads, containers, and packages, checking against known CVEs and ensuring critical patches are applied. You’re protected from known exploits that attackers often use to hijack environments. According to Gartner, automated patching and vulnerability prioritisation can reduce breach risks by over 50%.

4. Secrets and Credential Monitoring – We help you identify, vault, and rotate critical credentials—API keys, tokens, SSH certs—before they become entry points. Our systems detect exposed secrets in public repos, logs, or misconfigured storage buckets. Gartner recommends automated secret discovery tools as a must-have for cloud-native security.

5. Behavioural Monitoring & Billing Anomaly Alerts – From file integrity monitoring to unusual usage trends, we keep eyes on everything. Spikes in GPU usage? New traffic from odd geographies? We detect and flag these instantly—often before your cloud provider does.

It’s Time to Get Proactive

The threat isn’t coming, it’s already here. LLMjacking, Shadow AI, and credential misuse are no longer niche problems. They’re signs of a broader trend: the silent monetisation of your infrastructure by threat actors exploiting the AI gold rush.

At Paramatrix, we specialise in helping organisations secure their cloud environments, regain visibility, and neutralise silent threats—before they cause lasting damage. And as part of our expanding cybersecurity service portfolio, we’d like to introduce Bulwark, our integrated security services platform.

Let’s Talk

If you’re concerned about the rising risks of LLMjacking or simply want to ensure your cloud and AI workloads are running safely and efficiently let’s schedule a conversation. We’ll help you secure your infrastructure, detect threats early, and ensure your cloud is powering your vision, not someone else’s model.