Luxury department store chain Neiman Marcus confirmed that nearly 65,000 customers were impacted by the theft of its database during recent attacks on the cloud-based data warehousing platform Snowflake.
Overall, more than 70 million transactions, 50 million customer emails, and 12 million gift card numbers were up for sale, along with employee info, and customer shopping data.
This is not the first time the company has been victim of a data breach.
In an attack in May 2020, the personal information of around 4.6 million online customers was exposed.
Neiman Marcus became aware of the breach - and then notified those affected - only more than a year later.
The admission by Neiman Marcus is the latest fallout from the Snowflake breach reported earlier this month, which impacted data belonging to at least 165 organizations, including Ticketmaster and Santander Bank.
A Mandiant investigation into the account compromises revealed the breaches occurred due to customers failing to implement multifactor authentication and proper access control.
The financially motivated threat actor was identified as UNC5537 and accessed accounts using valid credentials obtained from other sources.
Dirk Schrader, vice president of security research at Netwrix, says organizations should embrace the use of MFA and password management solutions, implement a just-in-time privilege approach to identity security, and ensure detailed monitoring.
A password-management solution helps ensure the use of complex, hard-to-crack passwords in place, restricts reusing passwords for multiple accounts, and relieves users from the burden of remembering them.
Gunnar Braun, technical manager at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, says the incident demonstrates that literally every company is a potential target for an attack, and every organization that stores data in any shape or form must take measures to protect that data.
He says for Neiman Marcus - and all other Snowflake customers - it comes down to protecting their credentials, like everyone should do for their PayPal, Gmail, and any other accounts.
Darren Williams, CEO and founder of BlackFog, warns the long-term effects of the breaches is unfortunate for customers, given how data is often leveraged for many years to come and sold on the Dark Web.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 19:10:09 +0000