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 that may impact cyber information assets, and to provide additional detection and mitigation advice to recipients. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security ("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 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.