Tag: cybersecurity

The biggest data breaches in 2024: 1 billion stolen records and rising

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We’re almost at the end of 2024, a year that will go down as having seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history. And just when you think that some of these hacks can’t get any worse, they do.

From huge stores of customers’ personal information getting scraped, stolen and posted online, to reams of medical data covering most people in the United States getting stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 have surpassed the 1 billion stolen records and rising. These breaches not only affect the individuals whose data was irretrievably exposed, but also embolden the criminals who profit from their malicious cyberattacks.

Travel with us to the not-so-distant past to look at how some of the biggest security incidents of 2024 went down, their impact and, in some cases, how they could have been stopped. 

AT&T’s data breaches affect “nearly all” of its customers, and many more non-customers

For AT&T, 2024 has been a very bad year for data security. The telecoms giant confirmed not one, but two separate data breaches just months apart.

In July, AT&T said cybercriminals had stolen a cache of data that contained phone numbers and call records of “nearly all” of its customers, or around 110 million people, over a six-month period in 2022 and in some cases longer. The data wasn’t stolen directly from AT&T’s systems, but from an account it had with data giant Snowflake (more on that later).

Although the stolen AT&T data isn’t public (and one report suggests AT&T paid a ransom for the hackers to delete the stolen data) and the data itself does not contain the contents of calls or text messages, the “metadata” still reveals who called who and when, and in some cases the data can be used to infer approximate locations. Worse, the data includes phone numbers of non-customers who were called by AT&T customers during that time. That data becoming public could be dangerous for higher-risk individuals, such as domestic abuse survivors.

That was AT&T’s second data breach this year. Earlier in March, a data breach broker dumped online a full cache of 73 million customer records to a known cybercrime forum for anyone to see, some three years after a much smaller sample was teased online.

The published data included customers’ personal information, including names, phone numbers and postal addresses, with some customers confirming their data was accurate. 

But it wasn’t until a security researcher discovered that the exposed data contained encrypted passcodes used for accessing a customer’s AT&T account that the telecoms giant took action. The security researcher told TechCrunch at the time that the encrypted passcodes could be easily unscrambled, putting some 7.6 million existing AT&T customer accounts at risk of hijacks. AT&T force-reset its customers’ account passcodes after TechCrunch alerted the company to the researcher’s findings. 

One big mystery remains: AT&T still doesn’t know how the data leaked or where it came from. 

Change Healthcare hackers stole medical data on “substantial proportion” of people in America

In 2022, the U.S. Justice Department sued health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group to block its attempted acquisition of health tech giant Change Healthcare, fearing that the deal would give the healthcare conglomerate broad access to about “half of all Americans’ health insurance claims” each year. The bid to block the deal ultimately failed. Then, two years later, something far worse happened: Change Healthcare was hacked by a prolific ransomware gang; its almighty banks of sensitive health data were stolen because one of the company’s critical systems was not protected with multi-factor authentication.

The lengthy downtime caused by the cyberattack dragged on for weeks, causing widespread outages at hospitals, pharmacies and healthcare practices across the United States. But the aftermath of the data breach has yet to be fully realized, though the consequences for those affected are likely to be irreversible. UnitedHealth says the stolen data — which it paid the hackers to obtain a copy — includes the personal, medical and billing information on a “substantial proportion” of people in the United States. 

UnitedHealth has yet to attach a number to how many individuals were affected by the breach. The health giant’s chief executive, Andrew Witty, told lawmakers that the breach may affect around one-third of Americans, and potentially more. For now, it’s a question of just how many hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. are affected. 

Synnovis ransomware attack sparked widespread outages at hospitals across London 

A June cyberattack on U.K. pathology lab Synnovis — a blood and tissue testing lab for hospitals and health services across the U.K. capital — caused ongoing widespread disruption to patient services for weeks. The local National Health Service trusts that rely on the lab postponed thousands of operations and procedures following the hack, prompting the declaration of a critical incident across the U.K. health sector.

A Russia-based ransomware gang was blamed for the cyberattack, which saw the theft of data related to some 300 million patient interactions dating back a “significant number” of years. Much like the data breach at Change Healthcare, the ramifications for those affected are likely to be significant and life-lasting. 

Some of the data was already published online in an effort to extort the lab into paying a ransom. Synnovis reportedly refused to pay the hackers’ $50 million ransom, preventing the gang from profiting from the hack but leaving the U.K. government scrambling for a plan in case the hackers posted millions of health records online. 

One of the NHS trusts that runs five hospitals across London affected by the outages reportedly failed to meet the data security standards as required by the U.K. health service in the years that ran up to the June cyberattack on Synnovis.

Ticketmaster had an alleged 560 million records stolen in the Snowflake hack

A series of data thefts from cloud data giant Snowflake quickly snowballed into one of the biggest breaches of the year, thanks to the vast amounts of data stolen from its corporate customers. 

Cybercriminals swiped hundreds of millions of customer data from some of the world’s biggest companies — including an alleged 560 million records from Ticketmaster, 79 million records from Advance Auto Parts and some 30 million records from TEG — by using stolen credentials of data engineers with access to their employer’s Snowflake environments. For its part, Snowflake does not require (or enforce) its customers to use the security feature, which protects against intrusions that rely on stolen or reused passwords. 

Incident response firm Mandiant said around 165 Snowflake customers had data stolen from their accounts, in some cases a “significant volume of customer data.” Only a handful of the 165 companies have so far confirmed their environments were compromised, which also includes tens of thousands of employee records from Neiman Marcus and Santander Bank, and millions of records of students at Los Angeles Unified School District. Expect many Snowflake customers to come forward. 

(Dis)honorable mentions

Cencora notifies over a million and counting that it lost their data:

U.S. pharma giant Cencora disclosed a February data breach involving the compromise of patients’ health data, information that Cencora obtained through its partnerships with drug makers. Cencora has steadfastly refused to say how many people are affected, but a count by TechCrunch shows well over a million people have been notified so far. Cencora says it’s served more than 18 million patients to date. 

MediSecure data breach affects half of Australia:

Close to 13 million people in Australia — roughly half of the country’s population — had personal and health data stolen in a ransomware attack on prescriptions provider MediSecure in April. MediSecure, which distributed prescriptions for most Australians until late 2023, declared insolvency soon after the mass theft of customer data.

Kaiser shared health data on millions of patients with advertisers:

U.S. health insurance giant Kaiser disclosed a data breach in April after inadvertently sharing the private health information of 13.4 million patients, specifically website search terms about diagnoses and medications, with tech companies and advertisers. Kaiser said it used their tracking code for website analytics. The health insurance provider disclosed the incident in the wake of several  other telehealth startups, like Cerebral, Monument and Tempest, admitting they too shared data with advertisers.

USPS shared postal address with tech giants, too:

And then it was the turn of the U.S. Postal Service caught sharing postal addresses of logged-in users with advertisers like Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, using a similar tracking code provided by the companies. USPS removed the tracking code from its website after TechCrunch notified the postal service in July of the improper data sharing, but the agency wouldn’t say how many individuals had data collected. USPS has over 62 million Informed Delivery users as of March 2024.

Evolve Bank data breach affected fintech and startup customers:

A ransomware attack targeting Evolve Bank saw the personal information of more than 7.6 million people stolen by cybercriminals in July. Evolve is a banking-as-a-service giant serving mostly fintech companies and startups, like Affirm and Mercury. As a result, many of the individuals notified of the data breach had never heard of Evolve Bank, let alone have a relationship with the firm, prior to its cyberattack.

National Public Data goes broke after millions of SSNs stolen

The company behind the data broker National Public Data filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, months after a massive data breach exposed some three billion records affecting around 270 million individuals, according to various analyses by security researchers. The data broker allowed its paying customers access to its vast databases of names, dates of birth, email and postal addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers (even if not all of the data was accurate). The company said it had to file for bankruptcy as it can no longer generate the revenue to address the deluge of class-action lawsuits and mounting liability from state and federal regulators.

First published on June 28 and updated on October 14.

Marriott reaches $52 million settlement over years of data breaches

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Marriott International is being taken to task after the hotel chain suffered multiple data breaches that exposed sensitive information for more than 344 million customers around the world. First, Marriott agreed to a settlement of with a group of 50 US attorneys general. According to Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, 131.5 million hotel customers in the states had their information compromised in the attacks on the hotels.

Second, a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission will require Marriott and its Starwood Hotels & Resorts subsidiary to implement a new information security system to protect against future data exposures. The FTC agreement includes measures such as data minimization, account review tools for its loyalty rewards programs and a link for guests to request deletion of their personal information.

Today’s settlements center on three separate data breaches at Marriott and Starwood between 2014 and 2020 that allowed malicious actors to access passport information, payment card numbers, loyalty numbers, dates of birth, email addresses and other personal information. But cybersecurity issues have been an ongoing concern for these two businesses over the past decade. Hackers used “social engineering techniques” to access an employee computer and steal about . Marriott was also part of a larger attack in 2019. Starwood was victim of discovered in 2018; the company faced a fine of about in the UK for that incident.

Apple fixes bugs in macOS Sequoia that broke some cybersecurity tools

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In September, Apple released the new version of its computer operating system macOS 15, also known as Sequoia, which broke the functionality of several cybersecurity products, including those made by CrowdStrike and Microsoft. 

Three weeks later, on Friday, Apple released the first update to macOS 15, and it claims to have fixed those issues. In the macOS 15.0.1 release notes, Apple says that the update “improves compatibility with third-party security software.”

Apple flagged the update in an email to TechCrunch on Thursday, and a spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up asking for more information. 

Patrick Wardle, the founder of macOS and iOS security startup DoubleYou, and a longtime expert on Apple security and the developer of several free security tools for macOS, wrote on X that the macOS update includes “a fix for the networking issues that plagued the initial macOS 15 release.”

“And to any Apple apologist who blamed 3rd-party vendors, you deserve to be slapped with a large trout as this was an Apple bug reported before [golden master],” Wardle wrote, referring to the first public release of the macOS 15 software.

When Apple first released macOS 15, several cybersecurity professionals said they were unable to use some security tools, such as CrowdStrike’s Falcon and Microsoft Defender, because of an apparent bug in the new macOS operating system. 

At the time, CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci said that the company was “waiting for a macOS Sequoia update” to provide official support for its cybersecurity products on Apple’s operating system. 

Ugur Koc, a developer who works as a cloud engineer for for cloud managed service provider Glueckkanja, said on X that the new macOS update “resolves the issue with [Microsoft] Defender for Endpoint and other antivirus software, where the network filter was causing issues with the internet connectivity.”

Neither CrowdStrike nor Microsoft responded to a request for comment. 

Stealthy Malware Has Infected Thousands of Linux Systems for Years

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Other discussions include: Reddit, Stack Overflow (Spanish), forobeta (Spanish), brainycp (Russian), natnetwork (Indonesian), Proxmox (Deutsch), Camel2243 (Chinese), svrforum (Korean), exabytes, virtualmin, serverfault and many others.

After exploiting a vulnerability or misconfiguration, the exploit code downloads the main payload from a server, which, in most cases, has been hacked by the attacker and converted into a channel for distributing the malware anonymously. An attack that targeted the researchers’ honeypot named the payload httpd. Once executed, the file copies itself from memory to a new location in the /temp directory, runs it, and then terminates the original process and deletes the downloaded binary.

Once moved to the /tmp directory, the file executes under a different name, which mimics the name of a known Linux process. The file hosted on the honeypot was named sh. From there, the file establishes a local command-and-control process and attempts to gain root system rights by exploiting CVE-2021-4043, a privilege-escalation vulnerability that was patched in 2021 in Gpac, a widely used open source multimedia framework.

The malware goes on to copy itself from memory to a handful of other disk locations, once again using names that appear as routine system files. The malware then drops a rootkit, a host of popular Linux utilities that have been modified to serve as rootkits, and the miner. In some cases, the malware also installs software for “proxy-jacking,” the term for surreptitiously routing traffic through the infected machine so the true origin of the data isn’t revealed.

The researchers continued:

As part of its command-and-control operation, the malware opens a Unix socket, creates two directories under the /tmp directory, and stores data there that influences its operation. This data includes host events, locations of the copies of itself, process names, communication logs, tokens, and additional log information. Additionally, the malware uses environment variables to store data that further affects its execution and behavior.

All the binaries are packed, stripped, and encrypted, indicating significant efforts to bypass defense mechanisms and hinder reverse engineering attempts. The malware also uses advanced evasion techniques, such as suspending its activity when it detects a new user in the btmp or utmp files and terminating any competing malware to maintain control over the infected system.

By extrapolating data such as the number of Linux servers connected to the internet across various services and applications, as tracked by services such as Shodan and Censys, the researchers estimate that the number of machines infected by Perfctl is measured in the thousands. They say that the pool of vulnerable machines—meaning those that have yet to install the patch for CVE-2023-33426 or contain a vulnerable misconfiguration—is in the millions. The researchers have yet to measure the amount of cryptocurrency the malicious miners have generated.

People who want to determine if their device has been targeted or infected by Perfctl should look for indicators of compromise included in Thursday’s post. They should also be on the lookout for unusual spikes in CPU usage or sudden system slowdowns, particularly if they occur during idle times. Thursday’s report also provides steps for preventing infections in the first place.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

Hackers Threaten to Leak Planned Parenthood Data

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Even those of you who do everything you can to secure those secrets can find yourself vulnerable—especially if you’re using a YubiKey 5 authentication token. The multifactor authentication devices can be cloned thanks to a cryptographic flaw that can’t be patched. The company has rolled out some mitigation measures—and the attack itself is relatively difficult to pull off. But it may be time to invest in a new dongle.

That’s not all, folks. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

At the end of August, cybercriminals from the ransomware group RansomHub appear to have hacked into the systems of Planned Parenthood’s Montana branch. The organization this week confirmed it had suffered from a “cybersecurity incident” on August 28 and said its staff immediately took parts of its network offline, reporting the incident to law enforcement.

Days after the incident took place, RansomHub claimed to be behind the attack, posting Planned Parenthood on its leak website. The criminal group said it would publish 93 GB of data. It is unclear what, if anything, the ransomware group has obtained, but Planned Parenthood clinics can hold a huge array of highly sensitive data about patients, including information on abortion appointments. (Around 400,000 Planned Parenthood patients in Los Angeles were impacted following a similar ransomware incident in 2021.)

In recent months, RansomHub has emerged as one of the most active ransomware-as-a-service groups, following the law enforcement disruption of LockBit. According to an FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency alert at the end of August, the group is “efficient and successful” and has stolen data from at least 210 victims since it formed in February. “The affiliates leverage a double-extortion model by encrypting systems and exfiltrating data to extort victims,” the alert said.

The Nigeria-based scammers known as the Yahoo Boys run almost every scam in the playbook—from romance scams to pretending to be FBI agents. Yet there’s little-more devious than the increase in sextortion cases linked to the West African scammers. This week, Nigerian brothers Samuel Ogoshi and Samson Ogoshi were sentenced to more than 17 years in US jail for running sextortion scams, following their extradition earlier this year. It is the first time Nigerian scammers have been prosecuted for sextortion in the US, the BBC reported.

The Ogoshi brothers, who pleaded guilty in April, have been linked to the death of 17-year-old Jordan DeMay, who took his life six hours after he started talking to the scammers, who posed as a girl, on Instagram. The teenager had been duped into sending the brothers explicit images, and after he had done so, they threatened to post the images online unless he paid them hundreds of dollars. US prosecutors said the brothers sexually exploited and extorted more than 100 victims, with at least 11 of them being minors. There has been a huge spike in sextortion cases in recent years.

In June, the US Commerce Department banned the sale of Kaspersky’s antivirus tools over national security concerns about its links to the Russian government. (Kaspersky has, for years, denied connections). The firm later fired its workers and said it was closing its US business. This week, cybersecurity company Pango Group announced it is purchasing Kaspersky Lab’s US antivirus customers, according to Axios. This equates to around 1 million customers, who will be transitioned to Pango’s antivirus software Ultra AV. Ahead of the Kaspersky deal, parent company Aura also announced it was spinning out Pango Group into its own business. Pango’s president said customers would not need to take any action and that it would allow subscribers to continue to receive updates after September 29, when Kaspersky updates will stop.

For years, the EU has been trying to introduce new child protection laws that would require private chats to be scanned for child sexual abuse material—something that would potentially undermine encrypted messaging apps that provide everyday privacy to billions of people. The plans have been highly controversial and were shelved earlier this year. However, the proposed law, which has been dubbed “chat control,” reappeared in legislators’ in-trays this week. The Council of the EU, which is currently chaired by Hungary, wants to pass legislation by October, but reports say strong resistance to the plans still remain.

X adds passkey logins for Android users

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X today that it is rolling out support for passkeys on its Android app. The social media platform formerly known as Twitter introduced this security option for iOS users in January, then in April.

Passkeys started to take off as an option from tech companies and online services last year. We have a detailed , but in short, this approach to protecting an account creates a digital authentication credential. It’s a stronger alternative to passwords, which can be guessed or stolen. Even have been moving to offer a passkey option for customers.

For X users, you’ll still need a password in order to create an account. But once you’re in the app, you’ll need to click through some menu options to a passkey. It’s listed under “Additional password protection” in the Security tab.

Your Gym Locker May Be Hackable

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Thousands of electronic lockers found in gyms, offices, and schools could be vulnerable to attacks by criminals using cheap hacking tools to access administrator keys, according to new research.

At the Defcon security conference on Sunday, security researchers Dennis Giese and “braelynn” demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack showing how digital management keys could be extracted from lockers, copied, and then used to open other lockers in the same location. The researchers focused on various models of electronic locks from two of the world’s biggest manufacturers, Digilock and Schulte-Schlagbaum.

Over the past few years, the researchers, who both have backgrounds in lock picking, have been examining various electronic locks that use numerical keypads, allowing people to set and open them with a PIN. The work comes on the back of various examples of hotel door locks being found to be hackable, vulnerabilities in high-security locks, and commercial safes being alleged to have backdoors.

For the research, Giese and braelynn purchased electronic locks on eBay, snapping up those sold after some gyms closed during the Covid-19 pandemic and from other failed projects. Giese focused on Digilock, while braelynn looked at Schulte-Schlagbaum. Over the course of the research, they looked at legacy models from Digilock dating from 2015 to 2022 and models from Schulte-Schlagbaum from 2015 to 2020. (They also purchased some physical management keys for Digilock systems.)

Showing how security flaws could be abused by a prepared hacker, the researchers say they can take the electronic lock apart, then extract the device’s firmware and stored data. This data, Giese says, can contain PINs that have been set, management keys, and programming keys. The manager key ID can be copied to a Flipper Zero or cheap Arduino circuit board and used to open other lockers, Giese says.

“If you access one lock, we can open all of them in whatever the unit is—the whole university, the whole company,” Giese says. “We can clone and emulate keys very easily, and the tools aren’t that complicated.” Whoever owns the lockers manages them, Giese says.

Ahead of developing this proof-of-concept attack, Giese says, it took some time and effort to understand how the locker systems function. They took the locks apart and used cheap debugging tools to access the devices’ erasable, programmable read-only memory, known as EEPROM. Often, in the locks they tested, this was not secured, allowing data to be pulled from the system.

“From the EEPROM, we can pull out the programming key ID, all manager key IDs, and the user PIN/ User RFID UID,” Giese says. “Newer locks erase the set user PIN when the locker is unlocked. But the PIN remains if the locker was opened with a manager key/programming key.”

The researchers say they reported the findings to both impacted companies, adding they had spoken to Digilock about the findings. Digilock tells WIRED it has issued a fix for vulnerabilities found. The researchers say Schulte-Schlagbaum did not respond to their reports; the company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Student raised security concerns in Mobile Guardian MDM weeks before cyberattack

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A person claiming to be a student in Singapore publicly posted documentation showing lax security in a widely popular school mobile device management service called Mobile Guardian, weeks before a cyberattack on the company resulted in the mass-wiping of student devices and widespread disruption.

In an email with TechCrunch, the student — who declined to provide his name citing fear of legal retaliation — said he reported the bug to the Singaporean government by email in late May but could not be sure that the bug was ever fixed. The Singaporean government told TechCrunch that the bug was fixed prior to Mobile Guardian’s cyberattack on August 4, but the student said that the bug was so easy to find and trivial for an unsophisticated attacker to exploit, that he fears there are more vulnerabilities of similar exploitability.

The U.K.-based Mobile Guardian, which provides student device management software in thousands of schools around the world, disclosed the breach on August 4 and shut down its platform to block the malicious access, but not before the intruder used their access to remotely wipe thousands of student devices.

A day later, the student published details of the vulnerability he had previously sent to the Singaporean Ministry of Education, a major customer of Mobile Guardian since 2020.

In a Reddit post, the student said the security bug he found in Mobile Guardian granted any signed-in user “super admin” access to the company’s user management system. With that access, the student said, a malicious person could perform actions that are reserved for school administrators, including the ability to “reset every person’s personal learning device,” he said. 

The student wrote that he reported the issue to the Singaporean education ministry on May 30. Three weeks later, the ministry responded to the student saying the flaw is “no longer a concern,” but declined to share any further details with him, citing “commercial sensitivity,” according to the email seen by TechCrunch. 

When reached by TechCrunch, the ministry confirmed it had received word of the bug from the security researcher, and that “the vulnerability had been picked up as part of an earlier security screening, and had already been patched,” as per spokesperson Christopher Lee.

“We also confirmed that the disclosed exploit was no longer workable after the patch. In June, an independent certified penetration tester conducted a further assessment, and no such vulnerability was detected,” said the spokesperson.

“Nevertheless, we are mindful that cyber threats can evolve quickly and new vulnerabilities discovered,” the spokesperson said, adding that the ministry “regards such vulnerability disclosures seriously and will investigate them thoroughly.”

Bug exploitable in anyone’s browser

The student described the bug to TechCrunch as a client-side privilege escalation vulnerability, which allowed anyone on the internet to create a new Mobile Guardian user account with an extremely high level of system access using only the tools in their web browser. This was because Mobile Guardian’s servers were allegedly not performing the proper security checks and trusting responses from the user’s browser.

The bug meant that the server could be tricked into accepting the higher level of system access for a user’s account by modifying the network traffic in the browser.

TechCrunch was provided a video — recorded on May 30, the day of disclosure — demonstrating how the bug works. The video shows the user creating a “super admin” account using only the browser’s in-built tools to modify the network traffic containing the user’s role to elevate that account’s access from “admin” to “super admin.”

The video showed the server accepting the modified network request, and when logged in as that newly created “super admin” user account, granted access to a dashboard displaying lists of Mobile Guardian enrolled schools.

Mobile Guardian CEO Patrick Lawson did not respond to multiple requests for comment prior to publication, including questions about the student’s vulnerability report and whether the company fixed the bug.

After we contacted Lawson, the company updated its statement as follows: “Internal and third party investigations into previous vulnerabilities of the Mobile Guardian Platform are confirmed to have been resolved and no longer pose a risk.” The statement did not say when the previous flaws were resolved nor did the statement explicitly rule out a link between the previous flaws and its August cyberattack. 

This is the second security incident to beset Mobile Guardian this year. In April, the Singaporean education ministry confirmed the company’s management portal had been hacked and the personal information of parents and school staff from hundreds of schools across Singapore compromised. The ministry attributed the breach to Mobile Guardian’s lax password policy, rather than a vulnerability in its systems.

Do you know more about the Mobile Guardian cyberattack? Are you affected? Get in touch. You can contact this reporter on Signal and WhatsApp at +1 646-755-8849, or by email. You can send files and documents via SecureDrop.

Hundreds of Snowflake customer passwords found online are linked to info-stealing malware

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Cloud data analysis company Snowflake is at the center of a recent spate of alleged data thefts, as its corporate customers scramble to understand if their stores of cloud data have been compromised. 

Snowflake helps some of the largest global corporations — including banks, healthcare providers and tech companies — store and analyze their vast amounts of data, such as customer data, in the cloud.

Last week, Australian authorities sounded the alarm saying they had become aware of “successful compromises of several companies utilising Snowflake environments,” without naming the companies. Hackers had claimed on a known cybercrime forum that they had stolen hundreds of millions of customer records from Santander Bank and Ticketmaster, two of Snowflake’s biggest customers. Santander confirmed a breach of a database “hosted by a third-party provider,” but would not name the provider in question. On Friday, Live Nation confirmed that its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked and that the stolen database was hosted on Snowflake. 

Snowflake acknowledged in a brief statement that it was aware of “potentially unauthorized access” to a “limited number” of customer accounts, without specifying which ones, but that it has found no evidence there was a direct breach of its systems. Rather, Snowflake called it a “targeted campaign directed at users with single-factor authentication” and that the hackers used “previously purchased or obtained through infostealing malware,” which is designed to scrape a user’s saved passwords from their computer.

Despite the sensitive data that Snowflake holds for its customers, Snowflake lets each customer manage the security of their environments, and does not automatically enroll or require its customers to use multi-factor authentication, or MFA, according to Snowflake’s customer documentation. Not enforcing the use of MFA appears to be how cybercriminals allegedly obtained huge amounts of data from some of Snowflake’s customers, some of which set up their environments without the additional security measure. 

Snowflake conceded that one of its own “demo” accounts was compromised because it wasn’t protected beyond a username and password, but claimed the account “did not contain sensitive data.” It’s unclear if this stolen demo account has any role in the recent breaches. 

TechCrunch has this week seen hundreds of alleged Snowflake customer credentials that are available online for cybercriminals to use as part of hacking campaigns, suggesting that the risk of Snowflake customer account compromises may be far wider than first known. 

The credentials were stolen by infostealing malware that infected the computers of employees who have access to their employer’s Snowflake environment.

Some of the credentials seen by TechCrunch appear to belong to employees at companies known to be Snowflake customers, including Ticketmaster and Santander, among others. The employees with Snowflake access include database engineers and data analysts, some of whom reference their experience using Snowflake on their LinkedIn pages.

For its part, Snowflake has told customers to immediately switch on MFA for their accounts. Until then, Snowflake accounts that aren’t enforcing the use of MFA to log in are putting their stored data at risk of compromise from simple attacks like password theft and reuse. 

How we checked the data

A source with knowledge of cybercriminal operations pointed TechCrunch to a website where would-be attackers can search through lists of credentials that have been stolen from various sources, such as infostealing malware on someone’s computer or collated from previous data breaches. (TechCrunch is not linking to the site where stolen credentials are available so as not to aid bad actors.)

In all, TechCrunch has seen more than 500 credentials containing employee usernames and passwords, along with the web addresses of the login pages for the corresponding Snowflake environments. 

The exposed credentials appear to pertain to Snowflake environments belonging to Santander, Ticketmaster, at least two pharmaceutical giants, a food delivery service, a public-run freshwater supplier, and others. We have also seen exposed usernames and passwords allegedly belonging to a former Snowflake employee. 

TechCrunch is not naming the former employee because there’s no evidence they did anything wrong. (It’s ultimately both the responsibility of Snowflake and its customers to implement and enforce security policies that prevent intrusions that result from the theft of employee credentials.) 

We did not test the stolen usernames and passwords as doing so would break the law. As such, it’s unknown if the credentials are currently in active use or if they directly led to account compromises or data thefts. Instead, we worked to verify the authenticity of the exposed credentials in other ways. This includes checking the individual login pages of the Snowflake environments that were exposed by the infostealing malware, which were still active and online at the time of writing.

The credentials we’ve seen include the employee’s email address (or username), their password, and the unique web address for logging in to their company’s Snowflake environment. When we checked the web addresses of the Snowflake environments — often made up of random letters and numbers — we found the listed Snowflake customer login pages are publicly accessible, even if not searchable online.

TechCrunch confirmed that the Snowflake environments correspond to the companies whose employees’ logins were compromised. We were able to do this because each login page we checked had two separate options to sign in.

One way to login relies on Okta, a single sign-on provider that allows Snowflake users to sign in with their own company’s corporate credentials using MFA. In our checks, we found that these Snowflake login pages redirected to Live Nation (for Ticketmaster) and Santander sign-in pages. We also found a set of credentials belonging to a Snowflake employee, whose Okta login page still redirects to an internal Snowflake login page that no longer exists.

Snowflake’s other login option allows the user to use only their Snowflake username and password, depending on whether the corporate customer enforces MFA on the account, as detailed by Snowflake’s own support documentation. It’s these credentials that appear to have been stolen by the infostealing malware from the employees’ computers.

It’s not clear exactly when the employees’ credentials were stolen or for how long they have been online. 

There is some evidence to suggest that several employees with access to their company’s Snowflake environments had their computers previously compromised by infostealing malware. According to a check on breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, several of the corporate email addresses used as usernames for accessing Snowflake environments were found in a recent data dump containing millions of stolen passwords scraped from various Telegram channels used for sharing stolen passwords.

Snowflake spokesperson Danica Stanczak declined to answer specific questions from TechCrunch, including whether any of its customers’ data was found in the Snowflake employee’s demo account. In a statement, Snowflake said it is “suspending certain user accounts where there are strong indicators of malicious activity.”

Snowflake added: “Under Snowflake’s shared responsibility model, customers are responsible for enforcing MFA with their users.” The spokesperson said Snowflake was “considering all options for MFA enablement, but we have not finalized any plans at this time.”

When reached by email, Live Nation spokesperson Kaitlyn Henrich did not comment by press time.

Santander did not respond to a request for comment.

Missing MFA resulted in huge breaches

Snowflake’s response so far leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and lays bare a raft of companies that are not reaping the benefits that MFA security provides. 

What is clear is that Snowflake bears at least some responsibility for not requiring its users to switch on the security feature, and is now bearing the brunt of that — along with its customers.

The data breach at Ticketmaster allegedly involves upwards of 560 million customer records, according to the cybercriminals advertising the data online. (Live Nation would not comment on how many customers are affected by the breach.) If proven, Ticketmaster would be the largest U.S. data breach of the year so far, and one of the biggest in recent history.

Snowflake is the latest company in a string of high-profile security incidents and sizable data breaches caused by the lack of MFA. 

Last year, cybercriminals scraped around 6.9 million customer records from 23andMe accounts that weren’t protected without MFA, prompting the genetic testing company — and its competitors — to require users enable MFA by default to prevent a repeat attack.

And earlier this year, the UnitedHealth-owned health tech giant Change Healthcare admitted hackers broke into its systems and stole huge amounts of sensitive health data from a system not protected with MFA. The healthcare giant hasn’t yet said how many individuals had their information compromised but said it is likely to affect a “substantial proportion of people in America.”

Do you know more about the Snowflake account intrusions? Get in touch. To contact this reporter, get in touch on Signal and WhatsApp at +1 646-755-8849, or by email. You can also send files and documents via SecureDrop.

Government spyware is another reason to use an ad blocker

Posted on by faz_business


Ad blockers might seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but new reporting casts fresh light on how spyware makers are weaponizing online ads to allow governments to conduct surveillance.

Spyware makers are reportedly capable of locating and stealthily infecting specific targets with spyware using banner ads.

One of the startups that worked on an ad-based spyware infection system is Intellexa, a European company that develops the Predator spyware. Predator is able to access the full contents of a target’s phone in real time.

According to documents seen by Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Intellexa presented a proof-of-concept system in 2022 called Aladdin that enabled the planting of phone spyware through online ads. The documents included a demo of the Aladdin system with technical explanations on how the spyware infects its targets and examples of malicious ads: by “seemingly targeting graphic designers and activists with job offers, through which the spyware will be introduced to their device,” Haaretz reported.

It’s unclear if Aladdin was fully developed or was sold to government customers.

Another private Israeli company called Insanet succeeded in developing an ad-based infection system capable of locating an individual within an advertising network, Haaretz revealed last year.

Online ads help website owners, including this one, generate revenue. But online ad exchanges can be abused to push malicious code to a target’s device.

Delivering malware through malicious ads, often referred to as malvertising, works by injecting malicious code into the ads displayed on websites on computer and phone browsers. Much of these attacks rely on some interaction with the victim, such as tapping a link or opening a malicious file.

But the global ubiquity of online advertising vastly increases the reach that government customers have to target individuals — including their critics — with stealthy spyware.

While no phone or computer can ever be completely unhackable, ad blockers can be effective in stopping malvertising and ad-based malware before it ever hits the browser.

Ad blockers — as the name suggests — prevent ads from displaying in web browsers. Ad blockers don’t just hide the ads, but rather block the underlying website from loading the ads to begin with. That’s also good for privacy, since it means ad exchanges cannot use tracking code to see which sites users visit as they browse the web. Ad-blocking software is available for phones, as well.

Security experts have long advised using an ad blocker to prevent malvertising attacks. In 2022, the FBI said in a public service announcement to use an ad blocker as an online safety precaution.

“Everyone should block ads,” tweeted John Scott-Railton, a Citizen Lab senior researcher who has investigated government spyware, in response to the Haaretz report. “It’s a matter of safety.”