It’s potential the ShinyHunter hackers didn’t straight hack the EPAM employee, and easily gained entry to the Snowflake accounts utilizing usernames and passwords they obtained from previous repositories of credentials stolen by information stealers. However, as Reddington factors out, which means anybody else can sift by means of these repositories for these and different credentials stolen from EPAM accounts. Reddington says they discovered knowledge on-line that was utilized by 9 completely different infostealers to reap knowledge from the machines of EPAM staff. This raises potential considerations concerning the safety of information belonging to different EPAM clients.
EPAM has clients throughout numerous crucial industries, together with banks and different monetary companies, well being care, broadcast networks, pharmaceutical, power and different utilities, insurance coverage, and software program and hi-tech—the latter clients embody Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Amazon Net Providers. It’s not clear, nevertheless, if any of those firms have Snowflake accounts to which EPAM staff have entry. WIRED additionally wasn’t in a position to affirm whether or not Ticketmaster, Santander, Lending Tree, or Advance AutoParts are EPAM clients.
The Snowflake marketing campaign additionally highlights the rising safety dangers from third-party firms generally and from infostealers. In its weblog submit this week, Mandiant prompt that a number of contractors had been breached to realize entry to Snowflake accounts, noting that contractors—typically referred to as enterprise course of outsourcing (BPO) firms—are a possible gold mine for hackers, as a result of compromising the machine of a contractor that has entry to the accounts of a number of clients may give them direct entry to many buyer accounts.
“Contractors that clients have interaction to help with their use of Snowflake might make the most of private and/or non-monitored laptops that exacerbate this preliminary entry vector,” wrote Mandiant in its weblog submit. “These gadgets, typically used to entry the techniques of a number of organizations, current a big threat. If compromised by infostealer malware, a single contractor’s laptop computer can facilitate risk actor entry throughout a number of organizations, typically with IT and administrator-level privileges.”
The corporate additionally highlighted the rising threat from infostealers, noting that almost all of the credentials the hackers used within the Snowflake marketing campaign got here from repositories of information beforehand stolen by numerous infostealer campaigns, a few of which dated way back to 2020. “Mandiant recognized a whole lot of buyer Snowflake credentials uncovered by way of infostealers since 2020,” the corporate famous.
This, accompanied by the truth that the focused Snowflake accounts didn’t use MFA to additional shield them, made the breaches on this marketing campaign potential, Mandiant notes.
Snowflake’s CISO, Brad Jones, acknowledged last week that the dearth of multifactor authentication enabled the breaches. In a cellphone name this week, Jones advised WIRED that Snowflake is engaged on giving its clients the flexibility to mandate that customers of their accounts make use of multifactor authentication going ahead, “after which we’ll be trying sooner or later to [make the] default MFA,” he says.
Replace 6/17/2024, 5:45 pm EDT: The article was up to date to make clear the main points that Santander has publicly revealed concerning the hack.
