I could not find an appropriate place to post this
One of the worst breaches of all time happened earlier this last year with snowflake. If you want the tldr, here is google’s assessment: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/unc5537-snowflake-data-theft-extortion. Snowflakes statement: Detecting and Preventing Unauthorized User Access - Cybersecurity - Snowflake
Basically, someone (maybe a US soldier) got broad access to snowflake credentials that allowed them to access many, many corporate and govt accounts which contained extraordinarily sensitive data.
This has been a historic year for data breaches, a historic year for cybercrime (much of it aided by AI, as was predicted), and our enemies are absolutely capitalizing while we just stand here with our thumbs up our asses. What’s incredible about this breach, and Krebs is very rarely wrong, is that it seems to be coming from inside the house. Anyone with a confidential clearance this high to have the kind of credentials this person has been claiming (with success) should be easy to sniff out, but they are not, suggesting high capabilities. My working theory is a NK plant. NK has also had a lot of success by putting plants in US tech companies as well, which is why a lot of these breaches have been happening (in my view).
If you don’t know the long technical backstory, the United States is in a protracted and ongoing cyber war against a swath of enemy states - chiefly Russia, Iran, China, and NK. NK/China seem to have the most advanced nation state capabilities so far (unless you want to count private Israeli companies that sell services to other nation states, but I won’t go into detail on that here) and NK’s capabilities are IMO very impressive for a nation that does not have broad access to the web. I have a theory that this will become a prominent part of the next 4-8 years of the trump/trump-adjacent administrations as they deal with the rest of the world. Either we deal with this threat, which we are already losing badly to (and not just outright hacks, misinformation wars too), or we lose entirely. Every other country in the world has figured this out except maybe some European nations. This thread is for this stuff and will be a dump for anything interesting I find I can post publicly or related to the ongoing cyber threat of AI + the privacy crisis we are now facing that basically no one knows about.