AI provider keys that customers stored on Railway were stolen in an October breach and used to commit an estimated $740,000 in unauthorized spending, the platform-as-a-service provider said yesterday. It has promised to pay those charges itself when an AI provider will not refund them.

The company builds and runs apps for its customers and stores their secrets, such as API keys and database credentials, as environment variables. The attacker decrypted variables in at most 1.85% of workspaces, about 100,000, and its database queries looked for AI provider keys.

In an October 26 update, the company told customers asking about refunds for unauthorized AI spend that "Railway is unable to refund customers for spend performed with compromised API keys." It encouraged them to contact the AI providers directly and offered to escalate their requests.

According to the company's incident report, the decrypted data also included linked-account tokens for 1,852 users: BYOK agent keys and GitHub OAuth tokens. All were reset, each user was notified, and no logins to customer accounts using stolen credentials were found.

In addition to AI keys, one of the attacker's database queries matched cloud, database, and payment service credentials. The company's forensics did not show any customer databases being accessed, and there was no indication that customers' code repositories were downloaded.

The attacker also read the stored histories of 353 builds, including the variables and secrets passed to those builds.

The company's logs show which environments were exposed but not which variables, so the figure of about 100,000 workspaces is an upper limit.

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