What Cybersecurity Lessons Can Be Learned from the Snowflake Breach?

The Hacker News points out some cybersecurity lessons learned from the recent Snowflake cloud storage service breach that garnered 1.3 terabytes of personal data from 560 million outraged and litigious users of entertainment companies Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

“We tend to romanticize cybersecurity,” says the article, “however, not all cybersecurity challenges are equally hard. The guidance offered by Snowflake really makes this point: Multi-factor authorization is a must. It is an incredibly effective tool against a range of cyberattacks, including credential stuffing.”

Another lesson: companies should be picky when it comes to choosing where to host business-critical data. “‘There is no cloud – it’s just someone else’s computer,’ as the old saying goes.” Companies get a lot of access to the cloud’s resources, but not complete access. Cloud technologies achieve economies of scale by limiting what a single customer can do, and that sometimes includes the ability to implement security.

Cybercriminals maximize profit by automating mass attacks. They target large pools of victims with simple but effective methods. Credential stuffing is a cheap method. Hacker News calls it the 2024 equivalent of email spam and says that its low cost is a good indication that it should be almost 100% ineffective. The fact that it succeeds paints a bleak picture of global cybersecurity.

Implementing simple controls like single sign-on identification, multi-factor authentication, and password rotation are some important cybersecurity lessons to be learned and make the cost of large-scale attacks prohibitive. That doesn’t mean attacks won’t ever succeed, but it makes them less feasible and makes companies somewhat safer.