Australia's Ticketek is reportedly the latest company to suffer a cybersecurity breach, warning that users' personal information may have been stolen from a third-party global cloud-based platform.
According to the Guardian, Cyber Security Minister Claire O'Neill said late on Friday night that “many Australians” had been affected by the breach, which appears to be limited to exposing email addresses, names and dates of birth.
The ticketing company assured customers that their credit card details and passwords were safe, but O'Neill warned that people should still be wary of scammers. Ticketek said in a statement that it has already begun notifying affected customers and will provide further updates as more information becomes available.
On Friday evening, customers received an email from Ticketek about a “cyber incident” that affected account holders' information stored on a cloud-based platform managed by a “reputable global third-party supplier.”
The email did not name the third-party supplier, but said that since learning about the issue a few days ago, Ticketek has been carefully mobilizing its resources to complete its investigation and get back to users as soon as possible.
“We use secure encryption methods for handling credit card details and transactions are processed through a separate payment system and are therefore not affected. Ticketek does not store customer identification documents. We sincerely apologise to everyone who may have been affected by this incident,” the email said.
Ticketek did not say how many Australian customers were affected or whether the cloud-based platform it was referring to was Snowflake.The Australian Communications Authority's Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) released the notice on Saturday, saying it was aware of several companies that used Snowflake's services being breached.
Ticketek and Snowflake
The Ticketek data breach comes just days after hackers reportedly targeted cloud storage platform Snowflake, stealing data from hundreds of its customers.
The Boston-based company, known for providing cloud-based data storage and analytics services to many major brands, recently confirmed that it is investigating increased cyber threat activity targeting some of its customer accounts.
The statement comes in response to allegations by cybersecurity vendor Hudson Lock, which reported that Snowflake had experienced a “massive breach” affecting up to 400 companies.
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Snowflake Cybersecurity Breach
Hudson Lock discovered the incident after getting in touch with the hackers who allegedly accessed Ticketmaster and Santander Bank data, and the cybersecurity vendor said the hackers indicated all of these breaches stemmed from a breach in a single vendor, Snowflake.
The hackers claimed to have gained access to Snowflake by obtaining login credentials from an employee's ServiceNow account that was supposedly integrated into Snowflake's internal IT infrastructure.
This access allowed the hackers to circumvent security measures at Okta, Snowflake's single sign-on provider. After the intrusion, the hackers claimed they were able to generate session tokens and extract large amounts of data from the company.
Hudson Lock revealed that the hackers subsequently tried to extort $20 million from Snowflake, but received no response from the company.
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