Over 160 of the world’s largest enterprises had their data stolen this year. All by the same attack strategy.
Each of the businesses, ranging from AT&T and Santander Bank to Advance Auto Parts and Ticketmaster parent company LiveNation, had uploaded massive volumes of sensitive customer data to accounts hosted by cloud data service Snowflake but protected those accounts with little more than a username and password, failing to take further steps like requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA).
That might as well have been a bullseye for scammers.
After acquiring stolen Snowflake account credentials on criminal forums like Telegram and the dark web, a hacker raided the data storage repositories. They then used the theft of millions of people’s personal data to extort the companies, demanding ransom payments ranging from $300,000 to $5 million in exchange for promises not to sell or abuse the data.
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