# The Snowflake attacker pleaded guilty, two years after stale credentials did the work

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/blog/2026-08-06-snowflake-hacker-connor-moucka-pleads-guilty/
Last updated: 2026-08-29
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

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Connor Riley Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, pleaded guilty in Seattle federal court on August 6, 2026 to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy over the 2024 [Snowflake customer breaches](https://startwithidentity.com/breaches/snowflake-2024-credential-attacks/). At least 165 organizations were compromised and records on at least 100 million people exposed, including nearly all AT&T cellular customers for a six-month window in 2022. There was no Snowflake platform vulnerability. The credentials came from [infostealer](https://startwithidentity.com/glossary/infostealer/) logs harvested years earlier, the accounts had [MFA](https://startwithidentity.com/glossary/mfa/) disabled, and some passwords had gone unrotated for four years. Prosecutors put Moucka's personal proceeds at 495,000 dollars and victim losses above 9.5 million.

## Why it matters

The plea closes the loop on the cleanest case study in identity security. No exploit, no zero-day, no clever technique: infostealer logs bought or scraped, credentials that still worked years after theft, and tenants where MFA was optional and nobody enforced it. Sentencing is set for October 27, 2026, with a two-year mandatory minimum on the identity theft count. The durable lesson is about the shelf life of a stolen credential. A password taken in 2020 that still authenticates in 2024 is not a breach of the platform, it is a governance failure at the customer. Enforce MFA on every data-platform account including service accounts, rotate on a schedule you actually verify, and monitor infostealer dumps for your own domains. Full teardown: [Snowflake 2024](https://startwithidentity.com/breaches/snowflake-2024-credential-attacks/).

Source: [The Hacker News](https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/snowflake-hacker-pleads-guilty-over.html)