Suspect behind data theft at cloud provider Snowflake arrested
The data theft at Snowflake resulted in 170,000 concert tickets for Taylor Swift being given away. A suspect has now been arrested.
(Image: Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock.com)
Canadian authorities have arrested a man suspected of being behind the break-ins and data theft at cloud provider Snowflake. He is said to have broken into 165 customer accounts.
As Bloomberg reports, the Canadians arrested the suspect Alexander M. at the request of the USA with a provisional arrest warrant on October 30 of this year. This was announced by the Canadian Ministry of Justice. He was to be brought before a judge on Tuesday.
Charges unclear
The grounds for the charges remain unclear for the time being. Extradition requests are confidential intergovernmental communications, on which he could not comment, a spokesperson for the Canadian Department of Justice told Bloomberg. However, two anonymous people have identified the suspect M. as the person behind the Snowflake attacks.
Videos by heise
The suspect allegedly hacked accounts belonging to AT&T, Ticketmaster and numerous others and copied data from them, as well as blackmailing the companies. According to 404media, he appeared before the court deciding on his extradition without a lawyer. He was connected to the hearing by telephone from prison and stated that he had not hired a lawyer because the prison was in lockdown. A lawyer present stated that he had been contacted by M.'s family to see if the suspect wanted to keep him. After a short break in the session, the couple returned and said that M. was applying for legal aid. At the end of the session, when asked if he had anything else to add, the suspect replied: "Nothing more."
The cyber intrusions at Snowflake became known at the beginning of June. Following the emergence of customer data on the darknet, the company Live Nation, for example, confirmed the incident in a mandatory notification (Form K-8) to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, in which Snowflake databases were copied. This culminated, among other things, in the fact that the mastermind(s) gave away 170,000 concert tickets for Taylor Swift's performances – These came from Ticketmaster, a subsidiary of Live Nation.
(dmk)
