Canadian Authorities Arrest Snowflake Data Thief

Canadian authorities arrested Alexander “Connor” Moucka, whom they consider orchestrated a malicious marketing campaign that compromised 165 Snowflake accounts.

Moucka was scheduled to seem in court docket at present, although restricted info has been shared concerning his arrest or potential extradition. On-line, Moucka reportedly glided by the aliases “Judische” and “Waifu.”

Snowflake is an American cloud-based knowledge storage firm working on Amazon Net Companies, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Judische bragged about hacking a number of Snowflake victims on Telegram simply earlier than the assaults have been confirmed, prompting suspicion.

In Could, the storage vendor warned {that a} restricted variety of buyer accounts have been focused by risk actors, none of which have been protected by multifactor authentication.

Google Mandiant later investigated the breach and located that the attackers used previously compromised credentials from information-stealer infections to entry these accounts.

The risk actor behind the assaults is tracked as UNC5537, with its marketing campaign starting in April and focusing on organizations akin to Ticketmaster, Superior Auto Elements, Neiman Marcus, State Farm, AT&T, and others.

Up to now, the risk actor has demanded ransom funds starting from $300,000 to $5 million from organizations in change for deleting knowledge it steals from their Snowflake accounts.
Do not miss the most recent Dark Reading Confidential podcast, the place we speak about NIST’s post-quantum cryptography requirements and what comes subsequent for cybersecurity practitioners. Company from Basic Dynamics Info Expertise (GDIT) and Carnegie Mellon College break all of it down. Listen now!