Hackers steal “vital quantity” of information from tons of of Snowflake prospects

As many as 165 prospects of cloud storage supplier Snowflake have been compromised by a gaggle that obtained login credentials by information-stealing malware, researchers mentioned Monday.

On Friday, Lending Tree subsidiary QuoteWizard confirmed it was among the many prospects notified by Snowflake that it was affected within the incident. Lending Tree spokesperson Megan Greuling mentioned the corporate is within the strategy of figuring out whether or not knowledge saved on Snowflake has been stolen.

“That investigation is ongoing,” she wrote in an e mail. “As of this time, it doesn’t seem that client monetary account info was impacted, nor info of the father or mother entity, Lending Tree.”

Researchers from Mandiant, a Google-owned safety agency Snowflake retained to analyze the mass compromise, mentioned Monday that the businesses have to date recognized 165 prospects whose knowledge could have been stolen within the spree. Stay Nation confirmed 10 days in the past that knowledge its TicketMaster group saved on Snowflake had been stolen following a posting providing the sale of the complete names, addresses, telephone numbers, and partial bank card numbers for 560 million Ticketmaster prospects.

Santander, Spain’s largest financial institution, mentioned not too long ago that knowledge belonging to a few of its prospects has additionally been stolen. The identical group promoting the Ticketmaster knowledge supplied the sale of Santander knowledge. Researchers from safety agency Hudson Rock mentioned that stolen knowledge was additionally saved on Snowflake. Santander has neither confirmed nor denied the declare.

Mandiant’s Monday publish mentioned that every one the compromises it has tracked to date have been the results of login credentials for Snowflake accounts being stolen by infostealer malware and saved in huge logs, typically for years at a time. Not one of the affected accounts made use of multifactor authentication, which requires customers to offer a one-time password or extra technique of authentication moreover a password.

The group finishing up the assaults is financially motivated, with members principally positioned in North America. Mandiant is monitoring it as UNC5537. Firm researchers wrote:

Primarily based on our investigations up to now, UNC5537 obtained entry to a number of organizations’ Snowflake buyer situations by way of stolen buyer credentials. These credentials have been primarily obtained from a number of infostealer malware campaigns that contaminated non-Snowflake owned techniques. This allowed the risk actor to realize entry to the affected buyer accounts and led to the export of a major quantity of buyer knowledge from the respective Snowflake buyer situations. The risk actor has subsequently begun to extort lots of the victims immediately and is actively making an attempt to promote the stolen buyer knowledge on acknowledged cybercriminal boards.

Mandiant recognized that almost all of the credentials utilized by UNC5537 have been out there from historic infostealer infections, a few of which dated way back to 2020.

The risk marketing campaign carried out by UNC5537 has resulted in quite a few profitable compromises resulting from three major components:

1. The impacted accounts weren’t configured with multi-factor authentication enabled, that means profitable authentication solely required a sound username and password.
2. Credentials recognized in infostealer malware output have been nonetheless legitimate, in some instances years after they have been stolen, and had not been rotated or up to date.
3. The impacted Snowflake buyer situations didn’t have community enable lists in place to solely enable entry from trusted areas.

Preliminary entry to affected Snowflake accounts usually occurred with the usage of the corporate’s native SnowSight or SnowSQL, that are a web-based consumer interface and a command-line interface respectively. The risk actors additionally used a customized utility that exhibits up as “rapeflake” in logs and that Mandiant tracks as FrostBite.