Having spent a lot of time in the Snowflake ecosystem, a few things to understand.
Snowflake is both a platform and a database. Customers can implement any level of security within the system. For example, when Snowflake introduced OAuth functionality, they put a lot of pressure for us to implement it in our tool. We're small enough and they are a significant partner so we priortised and got it into our platform so that a customer CAN implement it if they want too.
The keyword here is CAN. As a platform with database functionality, Snowflake allows customers to implement any level of security for access. So each instance of Snowflake https://XX123456.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com/ security is independent. So let's answer some questions
* "Was this a production breach", No, this was not a production breach. This is not when hackers went into the Azure and were able to elevate credentials and see all accounts.
* "But doesn't Snowflake use MFA", yes and on INTERNAL systems and the ability to connect to the PROD environment of SF it would absolutely have that. However, every customer has the ability to configure a user's credentials for access in their instance https://XX123456.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com/. Likely, the SE was granted access to the client's instance through the use of a user name and password.
* "But why not use MFA then Snowflake", this comes back to Okta. You have to create a trust relationship between providers. That's easy when you are only talking about your own employees. They all sit in your same directory. However, to set up a separate trust relationship for another domain, well now we have to get the security team of the client involved. All this so that someone can take a little bit of data and move it into another environment in order to do a demonstration. Not likely.
* "Well that just sounds stupid, my application has SSO enabled." True, but as also a database - Snowflake has to account for entire ecosystem that don't even support SSO-OAuth. For example, two major products that do not support SSO connections to Snowflake: Azure Machine Learning and Zapier. Both only support user name / password connections to Snowflake. So if you were an SE trying to show the value of Snowflake and its integration with AzureML; the ONLY way you could do that would be through user name / password functionality.
The issue in all of this is we are so used to thinking of SaaS as just an application. Databases have to support all sorts of application weirdness. Here is my gut thought on how this went down.
* The SE was working with multiple clients. These clients in an effort to save time and not wanting to have their security team involved and try and create a trust relationship with Snowflake went ahead and created a user name and password for the SE into the client environment vs setting up SSO. Again, this is ONLY controlled by the client.
* The SE at some point had active access to multiple instances of Snowflake to their various clients; with various levels of access depending upon the skill and fastidiousness of the client when they created the account for the Snowflake SE into their account. Again, how the SE is connecting to Snowflake is the same way any other user and application are doing so. I know this for a fact as SEs have to create their own throwaway demo instances https://XX123456.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com/. SEs don't have access into the backend of Snowflake.
* At some point this SE had malware installed on to their computer. At this point, this person was cooked and any customer who had given them access to the environment.
As for Hudson Rocks, they can go f themselves for doxing the SE. It was quite trivial to find who this person was and based on the Snowflake announcement they no longer have a job. That person was having an awful week already, now there name is out there. So again, F Hudson for doxing. It would have been easy to blind them out of the exchange (they did the hacker), but did not do so for the victim.