It’s the first time that the number of affected Snowflake customers has been disclosed since the account hacks began in April.
So far, only Ticketmaster and LendingTree have confirmed data thefts where their stolen data was hosted on Snowflake.
Several other Snowflake customers say they are currently investigating possible data thefts from their Snowflake environments.
Mandiant said the threat campaign is “ongoing,” suggesting the number of Snowflake corporate customers reporting data thefts may rise.
Last week, TechCrunch found circulating online hundreds of Snowflake customer credentials stolen by malware that infected the computers of staffers who have access to their employer’s Snowflake environment.
Snowflake’s security problems following a recent spate of customer data thefts are, for want of a better word, snowballing.
TechCrunch earlier this week found online hundreds of Snowflake customer credentials stolen by password-stealing malware that infected the computers of employees who have access to their employer’s Snowflake environment.
It’s not yet known how many Snowflake customers are affected, or if Snowflake knows yet.
Snowflake said it has to date notified a “limited number of Snowflake customers” who the company believes may have been affected.
Snowflake declined to say what role, if any, the then-Snowflake employee’s demo account has on the recent customer breaches.
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.
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.
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.
In our checks, we found that these Snowflake login pages redirected to Live Nation (for Ticketmaster) and Santander sign-in pages.
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.
Data transformation and optimization — tasks that many, if not most, large enterprises deal with — aren’t easy.
The result was Coalesce, a San Francisco-based company building a suite of data transformation services, apps and tools.
“The data transformation layer has long been the largest bottleneck in analytics,” Petrossian, Coalesce’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
Coalesce’s response is a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.
That sort of vendor lock-in could be an anathema to expansion, especially given that Coalesce isn’t the only data transformation tool vendor in town.
Observe — not to be confused with Observe.AI — builds observability tools for machine-generated data that aims to break down data silos, useful for developers to understand how apps are working, being used, and potentially failing.
The main use case for Observe today is to analyze data to troubleshoot when an application is not working as it should be.
It’s very permissive.” The company today works with third-parties to enhance that work but he doesn’t rule out native applications in these and other areas down the line.
“We see it as a lever to unlock new customers,” he said of the investment thesis of Snowflake Ventures.
[In data,] there is nothing that competes with Observe right now,” Williams added.
Apparently Frank Slootman, the veteran tech executive, was popular with investors, at least judging from their reaction that he will be stepping down as CEO of Snowflake.
The company stock price has plunged over 24% in after hours trading on the news.
Slootman came on board in 2019, taking over for veteran executive Bob Muglia, and was charged with taking the company public the following year.
In fact, Fortune reported that the chief executive was making an eye popping $95 million a month at one point.
Prior to coming to Snowflake, he spent six years as chairman and CEO at ServiceNow.
“Samooha customers will benefit from the many built-in platform capabilities of Snowflake, as well as the powerful network of Snowflake data cloud.
Snowflake customers, meanwhile, will be able to more quickly and easily build, connect and use data clean rooms where their data already lives, directly in Snowflake.”Los Altos-based Samooha, which Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmick co-founded in 2022, competes in an increasingly crowded data clean room field.
AWS has a data clean room product, as do startups like Herb.
A native app on Snowflake, Samooha provides a no-code UI customers can use to access and build clean room apps.
According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers spending more than $1 billion a year on media will have used data clean rooms for applications such as analytics, measuring campaign results and easing data integration by the end of the year.
