UNC5537’s Snowflake data-theft campaign made SaaS identity controls a first-order data platform risk
Mandiant (Google Cloud) reported a financially motivated cluster, UNC5537, systematically accessing Snowflake customer instances using stolen credentials—then stealing data and pursuing extortion and resale. Mandiant says it found no evidence the activity originated from a breach of Snowflake’s own enterprise environment; incidents it investigated traced back to compromised customer credentials, often sourced from historical infostealer infections dating to 2020. The campaign’s success, per Mandiant, was strongly associated with missing MFA, long-lived unrotated credentials, and lack of network allow lists—shifting the security conversation from “SaaS breach” to “identity hygiene as data-platform blast radius.” Read more