Canadian Pleads Guilty to Snowflake Data Breach

A Canadian man has pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in a massive cybercrime campaign that compromised the data of more than 165 organizations through their accounts with cloud storage provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, entered his plea on August 5, 2026, in a federal court in Washington state, admitting to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and a related conspiracy.

Moucka faces a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for aggravated identity theft and up to 30 to 32 years for the other charges combined. His sentencing is scheduled for October 27, 2026. He was arrested in late 2024 in Canada and extradited to the United States in July 2025.

According to court documents and authorities, between February and October 2024, Moucka and his co-conspirators used stolen login credentials to access customer accounts on the Snowflake platform. The credentials had been harvested years earlier by information-stealing malware and were still valid because they had never been changed and the accounts lacked multifactor authentication. The group, tracked by cybersecurity firm Mandiant as UNC5537, stole billions of sensitive...