Alert - Unauthorized user access to Snowflake customer accounts

Audience

This Alert is intended for IT professionals and managers.

Purpose

An Alert is used to raise awareness of a recently identified cyber threat Cyber threatA threat actor, using the internet, who takes advantage of a known vulnerability in a product for the purposes of exploiting a network and the information the network carries. that may impact cyber information assets, and to provide additional detection DetectionThe monitoring and analyzing of system events in order to identify unauthorized attempts to access system resources. and mitigation advice to recipients. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security Cyber securityThe protection of digital information, as well as the integrity of the infrastructure housing and transmitting digital information. More specifically, cyber security includes the body of technologies, processes, practices and response and mitigation measures designed to protect networks, computers, programs and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access so as to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability. ("Cyber Centre") is also available to provide additional assistance regarding the content of this Alert to recipients as requested.

Details

The Cyber Centre is aware of incidents impacting Snowflake customer data through unauthorized access resulting from malicious identity-based activity. Snowflake has reported that the activity is not the result of a vulnerability VulnerabilityA flaw or weakness in the design or implementation of an information system or its environment that could be exploited to adversely affect an organization's assets or operations. within Snowflake products^{Footnote 1}.

Suggested actions

The Cyber Centre strongly recommends that:

• Organizations review guidance provided by Snowflake to aid in the detection of suspicious activity and harden user accounts^{Footnote 1}. Organizations should also enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)^{Footnote 2}.
• The Cyber Centre has published guidance on defence in depth strategies for cloud-based services^{Footnote 3}. Organizations are encouraged to review the published guidance for security considerations.
• Organizations review and implement the Cyber Centre’s Top 10 IT Security Actions^{Footnote 4} with an emphasis on the following topics:
  • Consolidating, monitoring, and defending Internet gateways.
  • Enforce the management of administrative privileges.

If activity matching the content of this alert is discovered, recipients are encouraged to report via the My Cyber Portal, or email contact@cyber.gc.ca.