The Snowflake Cascading Breach: 165 Organizations Compromised by Stolen Credentials

The Breach

In mid-2024, a threat actor tracked as UNC5537 launched a systematic campaign targeting Snowflake cloud data platform customers. Using credentials stolen via infostealer malware, they accessed 165 organizations' Snowflake environments. The victims included:

• Ticketmaster/Live Nation: 560 million customer records
• AT&T: Call and text records of 110 million customers (nearly all AT&T wireless subscribers)
• Santander Bank: 30 million customer records
• Advance Auto Parts: 2.3 million records
• And 161 more organizations

The Root Cause: Credentials Without MFA

The attack was devastatingly simple:

1. Infostealer malware on employee devices captured Snowflake login credentials
2. These credentials worked because MFA was not enforced on Snowflake accounts
3. Once in, attackers exported massive datasets from cloud data warehouses

Snowflake's response was telling: they announced they would begin requiring MFA for all accounts — an admission that optional security had failed catastrophically.

The Cascading Effect

This breach illustrates a dangerous property of cloud-era credential theft: one set of stolen credentials can unlock an organization's entire data warehouse. The cloud has centralized data in ways that amplify the impact of credential compromise.

How KAVI Protocol Prevents This

Infostealer Malware Captures Nothing

Infostealers work by scraping stored credentials from browsers, password managers, and system keystores. Under KAVI, there are no stored credentials to scrape. The Surprise Signature is generated from behavioral interaction patterns — it's not a string stored in a keychain or browser database.

Mandatory by Architecture, Not by Policy

The Snowflake breach happened because MFA was optional. KAVI's behavioral authentication is not a toggle — it's the entire authentication mechanism. You cannot opt out of using your own behavioral identity. There is no "enforce MFA" checkbox because the equivalent of multi-factor verification is intrinsic to every authentication.

165 Breach Points Reduced to Zero

Each of the 165 breached organizations used the same authentication model: username + password, optionally with MFA. Under KAVI, each organization's access would require the specific authorized user's live behavioral verification. Stealing credentials from one employee's infected laptop would yield nothing usable.

Conclusion

The Snowflake cascade is the clearest demonstration of what happens when cloud-scale data meets password-scale security. 165 organizations breached, nearly a billion records exposed, all because of stolen passwords and optional MFA. KAVI makes authentication mandatory, behavioral, and impossible to steal.