Northflank Breach: Which Secrets to Rotate and How to Check
If you deploy anything on Northflank’s shared platform, treat every secret you stored there as stolen. Northflank told customers on October 30, 2026 to “assume all environment variables have been decrypted” and to disable or rotate all keys, and its November 2 update kept that advice in place. Start with AI provider keys: Northflank says users reported unauthorized use of AI API keys they had supplied to the platform.
This guide covers what Northflank has confirmed so far, which secrets to rotate first, how to revoke keys at the provider so the old copies stop working, and how to check for abuse on your bills.
Before you start
- Applies to: Northflank customers on the shared control plane. Northflank says forward-deployed and dedicated control planes are unaffected
- You need: admin access to Northflank and to every provider whose keys you stored there (AI, cloud, payments, databases)
- Time: 30 to 90 minutes, depending on how many services you connect
- Key fact: rotating a value inside Northflank is not enough. The old key must be revoked at the provider that issued it
What happened at Northflank
Northflank’s incident page gives this timeline (all times UTC):
| Date and time (UTC) | What Northflank reported |
|---|---|
| Oct 30, 11:43 | Threat alert from Wiz; engineers start reviewing a minute later |
| Oct 30, 12:02 to 13:05 | Network policy patches; Wiz’s incident response team brought in |
| Oct 30, 13:40 | Customers told to rotate environment variables immediately |
| Oct 30, 13:58 | “Assume all environment variables have been decrypted. Disable/rotate all keys.” |
| Oct 30, 15:12 | Multiple users confirm their AI keys have been used |
| Oct 31, 01:04 | Audit logs turned on for all customers, including free accounts |
| Oct 30 to 31 | Secret rotation added for Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, MinIO and RabbitMQ addons |
| Nov 2, 11:09 | Northflank says the attack vector was contained within an hour of the first alert and forensic auditors are reviewing |
In the November 2 update, Northflank said the evidence points to secrets held in its control plane, that running workloads were unaffected, and that it has patched CVE-2026-98432 across its fleet, including bring-your-own-cloud clusters. It has not published a root cause yet and says it will share one. That CVE is a Linux kernel flaw we covered in our CVE-2026-98432 patch guide; Northflank has not said whether it was the way in.
Why AI keys are the first thing to rotate
Northflank was one of several AI developer platforms that disclosed incidents in October. Security firm Wiz, in its “Black October” report published October 30, describes stolen credentials being used to run large volumes of model calls. In two cases Wiz investigated, attackers made about 800,000 Amazon Bedrock calls over roughly 30 hours and about 1.7 million calls over 13 hours, which Wiz estimates likely ran up more than $100,000 at list price.
Wiz does not tie those two cases to Northflank specifically, and it says there is no single vulnerability linking the October incidents. The pattern still matters: a leaked AI key is billed to you within minutes of being used, while a leaked database password may sit unused for weeks.
Which secrets to rotate, in order
Northflank’s own priority list, from its incident page, is AI provider keys, cloud provider credentials, payment provider keys, private keys, then database and other service credentials. It applies to both project secrets and integration secrets.
- AI provider keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock and similar). These turn straight into spend.
- Cloud credentials such as AWS access keys, GCP service account keys and Azure client secrets. Attackers use them to reach Bedrock or start compute.
- Payment keys like Stripe secret keys and webhook signing secrets.
- Private keys: SSH deploy keys, JWT signing keys and TLS private keys.
- Databases and other services: connection strings, Redis passwords, SMTP credentials and third-party API tokens.
How to rotate a key properly
For each secret, do these steps in this order so your app keeps running:
- Create a new key at the provider (for example, a new key on your AI provider’s API keys page, or a new access key under your IAM user in AWS).
- Paste the new value into the matching Northflank secret group or environment variable and redeploy the services that use it.
- Confirm the service works with the new key.
- Revoke or delete the old key at the provider. This is the step that actually locks the attacker out. In AWS, deactivate and then delete the old access key in the IAM console.
- For Northflank database addons, use the new secret rotation option Northflank added on October 30 and 31, then update any external apps that connect to that database.
Northflank also says to turn off public access on addons where you had it enabled, sign back in, and reconnect version control integrations, because it revoked access tokens, sessions, VCS integrations and cross-account IAM roles where it could.
How to check whether your keys were abused
- AI provider usage pages: look at usage and cost by day from October 29 onward. Spikes in expensive models, or calls from API keys you rarely use, are the main signs.
- AWS: check Cost Explorer for Bedrock charges you don’t recognize and CloudTrail for calls from the access key you stored on Northflank.
- Northflank audit logs: now available on every plan, including free. Review recent activity on your projects and team for anything you don’t recognize.
- Set hard limits: add spend limits or budget alerts at each AI provider so a future leak caps out at a number you choose.
If you find unexpected AI usage or spend, Northflank’s advice is to contact the provider directly, naming OpenAI and Anthropic as examples. Providers handle disputed usage case by case; there is no published guarantee of refunds.
We walked through the provider-side steps in more detail after a similar incident in our OpenCode breach API key guide. If you also use AI coding extensions, our check for the malicious Claude Code extension covers another way keys leaked in October.
Frequently asked questions
Am I affected if my workloads run in my own cloud through Northflank BYOC?
Possibly. Northflank says customers on forward-deployed or dedicated control planes are unaffected, but secrets stored in its shared control plane are in scope even when workloads run in your cloud account. If you aren’t sure which control plane you use, rotate.
Did Northflank say how many customers were affected?
No. As of its November 2 update, Northflank had not published customer numbers or named the AI providers involved.
Is it enough to change the value in Northflank?
No. Changing the variable only gives your app a new key. The old key still works for anyone holding a copy until you revoke it at the provider.
Should I move off Northflank?
That depends on what its root cause report shows. Rotating and revoking every secret protects you either way, and it is the urgent step.
What to do next
Open a list of every secret group in your Northflank projects, work down it in the priority order above, and don’t mark a key done until the old one is revoked at the provider. Then set spend limits on every AI account.
Sources
Checked on November 4, 2026. Timeline and advice come from Northflank’s incident page; call volumes and cost estimates come from Wiz and were not independently verified. Northflank’s root cause analysis had not been published at the time of writing.
- Northflank status: security incident updates (Oct 30 to Nov 2, 2026)
- Wiz: “Black October” for AI developer platforms (Oct 30, 2026)
- RuntimeWire: Northflank tells customers to assume all environment variables are compromised
