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by i_k_k 748 days ago
There’s something missing here.

From what the Hudson Rock article shows, they were able to use an SE’s creds to access their demo account. This is not a customer account and shouldn’t (but of course could) contain sensitive info. It’s not clear to me how this snowballed into a larger breach.

Perhaps customers had granted this SE access to their accounts and the data within. Or perhaps there’s a deeper hack. But this isn’t clear to me from what I’ve read.

3 comments

I was just going to post the same thing. The files that they show in the screenshots are things like PROGRESSIVE_BID_CHANGE_202405271129.csv. Looks suspiciously like the Snowflake Sales Engineer's data for their job role closing a deal with Progressive, not Progressive's own data. And there's no reason to think that a SE would have broad access to customer data. There may be some overlap, but I doubt it contains sensitive customer data owned by Progressive.
You’re thinking “bid” is in reference to Snowflake bidding for progressive as a client?

I’d say thats not likely, I work in fintech and the first thing this filename indicates to me is a CSV feed of market data for bid prices (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid_price)

This is a common type of dataset a firm would dump into a datalake to use as reference data lookups against other more sensitive data (for pricing trades, etc.)

Something similar happened at a previous employer. Contractor was hired to do a big data PoC, and they managed to cajole access to a prod data dump for a more impactful demo.

They then managed to load all this PII data into an ElasticSearch instance that was open to the internet and was discovered by threat actors.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that something similar happened here, where an unscrubbed prod dataset was shared for a better demo.

There may have been administrative access that was not properly secured.