The recent $82K incident got me thinking about why GCP's native tools failed to prevent it.
The core issue most people miss:
GCP budget alerts are based on billing data — which is delayed by several hours. By the time the alert fires, the damage is already done.
Quota limits are even worse — they throttle requests but never revoke the key. An attacker just keeps dripping through.
The only reliable protection is monitoring raw API request count, which GCP updates in near real-time. Set a threshold per key — the moment it's crossed, revoke immediately.
I've been building a tool that does exactly this. Happy to discuss the technical approach or the IAM architecture in the comments.
Early access at cloudsentinel(.)dev if anyone is interested.