Reports of data breaches impacting major clients of Snowflake Inc. have caused the company to be investigated. Among these clients are Santander Bank and Ticketmaster.
Hundreds of millions of client records were allegedly taken by hackers. Australian authorities confirmed the effective breach of multiple organizations utilizing Snowflake.
Snowflake is a service that lets businesses store massive amounts of information on their computers. The assaults may have been related to data breaches that affected Santander and Ticketmaster.
On Thursday, shares of Snowflake were down.
While Snowflake did discover some compromised client accounts, they were unable to locate any proof of a system-wide intrusion. The breaches were caused by attacks involving weak one-factor authentication. For added protection, Snowflake suggested that users turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA).
May saw Snowflake announce first-quarter sales of $828.7 million, up 33% year-over-year, surpassing the $785.87 million average expectation from analysts. Earnings per share (EPS) of $0.14 fell short of the $0.18 predicted by analysts.
Investors were piqued when analysts highlighted Snowflake’s GenAI projects, such as Arctic and Cortex.
In the previous year, Snowflake stock dropped more than 26 percent. One of the largest data breaches in history may have begun as an attack on Snowflake’s clients, a cloud storage provider. Last week, an incident involving criminal hackers trying to access Snowflake client accounts using stolen login credentials was disclosed.
Cybercriminals have openly said that they are selling stolen data from two other large corporations and have claimed that the data was acquired from Snowflake accounts. This comes after Snowflake first reported that a “limited number” of customer accounts had been hacked.
Several questions remain, like how widespread the assault was, who exactly was behind it, and what the purpose of the malicious program aptly called “rapeflake” is.
It also emphasizes how info stealer malware has become increasingly popular in recent years and how important it is for businesses and third-party software developers to use multifactor authentication to decrease the likelihood of account breaches.
So far, the infamous cybercrime marketplace BreachForums has been the setting for much of the Snowflake drama. The forum was taken down by the FBI in mid-May, but a new version surfaced shortly after.
