bleepingcomputer.com
By Sergiu Gatlan
September 3, 2025

Update September 04, 06:27 EDT: Updated the list of cybersecurity companies whose Salesforce instances were breached in the Salesloft supply chain attack.

Workiva, a leading cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, notified its customers that attackers who gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system stole some of their data.

The company's cloud software helps collect, connect, and share data for financial reports, compliance, and audits. It had 6,305 customers at the end of last year and reported revenues of $739 million in 2024.

Its customer list includes 85% of the Fortune 500 companies and high-profile clients such as Google, T-Mobile, Delta Air Lines, Wayfair, Hershey, Slack, Cognizant, Santander, Nokia, Kraft Heinz, Wendy's, Paramount, Air France KLM, Mercedes-Benz, and more.

According to a private email notification sent to affected Workiva customers last week and seen by BleepingComputer, the threat actors exfiltrated a limited set of business contact information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and support ticket content.

"This is similar to recent events that have targeted several large organizations. Importantly, the Workiva platform and any data within it were not accessed or compromised," the company explained. "Our CRM vendor notified us of unauthorized access via a connected third-party application."

Workiva also warned impacted customers to remain vigilant, as the stolen information could be used in spear-phishing attacks.

"Workiva will never contact anyone by text or phone to request a password or any other secure details. All communications from Workiva come through our trusted official support channels," it said.

Salesforce data breaches
While Workiva didn't share more details regarding this attack, BleepingComputer has learned that this incident was part of the recent wave of Salesforce data breaches linked to the ShinyHunters extortion group that impacted many high-profile companies.

Most recently, Cloudflare disclosed that it was forced to rotate 104 Cloudflare platform-issued tokens stolen by ShinyHunters threat actors, who gained access to the Salesforce instance used for customer support and internal customer case management in mid-August.

ShinyHunters has been targeting Salesforce customers in data theft attacks using voice phishing (vishing) since the start of the year, impacting companies such as Google, Cisco, Allianz Life, Farmers Insurance, Workday, Qantas, Adidas, and LVMH subsidiaries, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Tiffany & Co.

More recently, the extortion group has shifted to using stolen OAuth tokens for Salesloft's Drift AI chat integration with Salesforce to gain access to customer Salesforce instances and extract sensitive information, such as passwords, AWS access keys, and Snowflake tokens, from customer messages and support tickets.

Using this method, ShinyHunters also gained access to a small number of Google Workspace accounts in addition to stealing Salesforce CRM data and breaching the Salesforce instances of multiple cybersecurity companies, including Zscaler, Tenable, CyberArk, Elastic, BeyondTrust, Proofpoint, JFrog, Rubrik, Cato Networks, and Palo Alto Networks.

bleepingcomputer.com
By Sergiu Gatlan
September 2, 2025

Cloudflare is the latest company impacted in a recent string of Salesloft Drift breaches, part of a supply-chain attack disclosed last week.
The internet giant revealed on Tuesday that the attackers gained access to a Salesforce instance it uses for internal customer case management and customer support, which contained 104 Cloudflare API tokens.

Cloudflare was notified of the breach on August 23, and it alerted impacted customers of the incident on September 2. Before informing customers of the attack, it also rotated all 104 Cloudflare platform-issued tokens exfiltrated during the breach, even though it has yet to discover any suspicious activity linked to these tokens.

"Most of this information is customer contact information and basic support case data, but some customer support interactions may reveal information about a customer's configuration and could contain sensitive information like access tokens," Cloudflare said.

"Given that Salesforce support case data contains the contents of support tickets with Cloudflare, any information that a customer may have shared with Cloudflare in our support system—including logs, tokens or passwords—should be considered compromised, and we strongly urge you to rotate any credentials that you may have shared with us through this channel."

The company's investigation found that the threat actors stole only the text contained within the Salesforce case objects (including customer support tickets and their associated data, but no attachments) between August 12 and August 17, after an initial reconnaissance stage on August 9.

These exfiltrated case objects contained only text-based data, including:

The subject line of the Salesforce case
The body of the case (which may include keys, secrets, etc., if provided by the customer to Cloudflare)
Customer contact information (for example, company name, requester's email address and phone number, company domain name, and company country)
"We believe this incident was not an isolated event but that the threat actor intended to harvest credentials and customer information for future attacks," Cloudflare added.

"Given that hundreds of organizations were affected through this Drift compromise, we suspect the threat actor will use this information to launch targeted attacks against customers across the affected organizations."

Wave of Salesforce data breaches
Since the start of the year, the ShinyHunters extortion group has been targeting Salesforce customers in data theft attacks, using voice phishing (vishing) to trick employees into linking malicious OAuth apps with their company's Salesforce instances. This tactic enabled the attackers to steal databases, which were later used to extort victims.

Since Google first wrote about these attacks in June, numerous data breaches have been linked to ShinyHunters' social engineering tactics, including those targeting Google itself, Cisco, Qantas, Allianz Life, Farmers Insurance, Workday, Adidas, as well as LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.

While some security researchers have told BleepingComputer that the Salesloft supply chain attacks involve the same threat actors, Google has found no conclusive evidence linking them.

Palo Alto Networks also confirmed over the weekend that the threat actors behind the Salesloft Drift breaches stole some support data submitted by customers, including contact info and text comments.

The Palo Alto Networks incident was also limited to its Salesforce CRM and, as the company told BleepingComputer, it did not affect any of its products, systems, or services.

The cybersecurity company observed the attackers searching for secrets, including AWS access keys (AKIA), VPN and SSO login strings, Snowflake tokens, as well as generic keywords such as "secret," "password," or "key," which could be used to breach more cloud platforms to steal data in other extortion attacks.

cstromblad.com Christoffer Strömblad Wednesday, August 27, 2025 -
In this multi-source analysis I’ve attempted to fuse publicly available information about the UNC6040 group into one report and analysis to provide a better view of the activity cluster named UNC6040 (Google/Mandiant naming).

Executive Summary
UNC6040 represents a sophisticated financially motivated threat group that has emerged as a significant threat to organizations utilizing cloud-based customer relationship management systems. First identified by Google’s Threat Intelligence Group1, this actor has been conducting voice phishing campaigns since at least December 20242 to compromise Salesforce environments for large-scale data theft and extortion purposes.

The group has successfully breached approximately 20 organizations across hospitality, retail, and education sectors3, demonstrating a clear preference for targets with substantial customer databases and valuable personally identifiable information. Perhaps most notably, the group successfully compromised Google’s own Salesforce environment through sophisticated OAuth token abuse4, highlighting their capability to breach even well-defended organizations.

What distinguishes UNC6040 from traditional threat actors is their primary reliance on social engineering rather than technical exploitation. By impersonating IT support personnel through voice calls, they guide victims to authorize malicious connected apps, specifically modified versions of Salesforce’s Data Loader tool1. This approach effectively bypasses traditional security controls including multi-factor authentication, representing a fundamental shift in the threat landscape that security teams must address.

Threat Actor Profile and Victimology
UNC6040’s targeting reveals a calculated approach to victim selection. The group primarily focuses on luxury retailers, hospitality organizations, and educational institutions3, with additional confirmed targeting of aviation, financial services, and technology companies2. This sector preference suggests a clear understanding of where high-value customer data concentrates and where cloud CRM adoption is mature.

The threat actor demonstrates varying levels of technical proficiency across different intrusions, with some operations achieving complete data extraction while others result in only partial exfiltration before detection1. This inconsistency may indicate either multiple operators with different skill levels or an evolving tradecraft as the group refines their techniques.

Intelligence suggests potential collaboration with other threat actors, particularly the ShinyHunters collective4. UNC6040 may engage in partnership models where initial compromise and data theft are followed by collaboration with specialized extortion groups months after the initial breach1. This delayed monetization strategy complicates attribution and incident response efforts.

Operational Capabilities and Techniques
The group’s attack methodology begins with extensive reconnaissance through automated phone systems and live calls where operators impersonate IT support staff53. This initial intelligence gathering phase allows them to understand organizational structures, identify key personnel, and develop credible pretexts for their social engineering approaches.

The technical implementation involves guiding victims to Salesforce’s connected app setup page where they authorize malicious applications using connection codes1. These modified Data Loader applications are often disguised with legitimate-sounding names such as “My Ticket Portal” to align with the social engineering narrative13. Once authorized, these applications provide API-level access enabling bulk data exfiltration through legitimate platform features.

Post-compromise activities extend beyond the initial Salesforce environment. The group demonstrates capability for lateral movement, targeting Okta, Microsoft 365, and Workplace environments to harvest additional credentials and expand their access32. They employ test queries before conducting full data extraction1, suggesting a methodical approach to validating access and identifying high-value datasets.

The group’s data exfiltration focuses on customer PII including names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and account metadata2. By avoiding custom malware and instead relying on legitimate tools and platform features, they maintain a minimal forensic footprint that complicates detection and attribution efforts2.

Infrastructure and Operational Security
UNC6040 demonstrates strong operational security practices, primarily accessing victim environments through Mullvad VPN IP addresses1. This VPN usage provides anonymity and complicates law enforcement efforts to track the group’s activities. The threat actors also utilize Okta phishing panels hosted on the same infrastructure as their vishing operations1, suggesting a centralized approach to their technical infrastructure.

The group’s infrastructure choices reflect an understanding of modern detection capabilities and a deliberate effort to blend malicious activity with legitimate traffic patterns. By leveraging standard Salesforce API calls and OAuth workflows4, they avoid triggering traditional security alerts focused on malware or anomalous network traffic.

Strategic Outlook and Future Developments
The success of UNC6040’s operations, including the high-profile breach of Google’s Salesforce environment4, will likely inspire both evolution of their own tactics and adoption of similar techniques by other threat actors. In the near term, we assess with moderate confidence that the group will expand their targeting to additional cloud CRM platforms as organizations increase security awareness around Salesforce-specific threats.

The demonstrated collaboration between UNC6040 and groups like ShinyHunters4 suggests a maturing criminal ecosystem where specialized actors collaborate to maximize the value extracted from compromised organizations. This partnership model is likely to expand, with UNC6040 potentially serving as an initial access broker for ransomware operations or other extortion groups.

The fundamental challenge posed by UNC6040 lies not in their technical sophistication but in their exploitation of human trust and legitimate platform features. As organizations implement phishing-resistant MFA and enhanced monitoring capabilities5, the group will likely evolve their social engineering tactics and potentially shift toward supply chain targeting through managed service providers and cloud service integrators.

Looking forward, the convergence of voice-based social engineering with OAuth abuse and API-level data access represents a maturation of the threat landscape that traditional perimeter-based security models are poorly equipped to address. Organizations must anticipate continued activity from UNC6040 and similar groups, with potential escalation in both the scale of operations and the sophistication of social engineering techniques employed.

The shift from technical exploitation to identity-based attacks demonstrated by UNC6040 requires a fundamental reconsideration of security architectures. As legitimate platform features become the primary vector for data exfiltration, the distinction between authorized and malicious activity becomes increasingly nuanced, demanding behavioral analytics and continuous monitoring capabilities that many organizations currently lack.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/voice-phishing-data-extortion/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/retail-hospitality-heists-in-the-digital-age/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

https://www.varonis.com/blog/salesforce-vishing-threat-unc604 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

https://guardz.com/blog/from-vishing-to-oauth-abuse-how-shinyhunters-compromised-the-cloud/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/technical-analysis-vishing-threats/ ↩︎ ↩︎

bleepingcomputer.com By Lawrence Abrams August 25, 2025 -
U.S. insurance giant Farmers Insurance has disclosed a data breach impacting 1.1 million customers, with BleepingComputer learning that the data was stolen in the widespread Salesforce attacks.

Farmers Insurance is a U.S.-based insurer that provides auto, home, life, and business insurance products. It operates through a network of agents and subsidiaries, serving more than 10 million households nationwide.

The company disclosed the data breach in an advisory on its website, saying that its database at a third-party vendor was breached on May 29, 2025.

"On May 30, 2025, one of Farmers' third-party vendors alerted Farmers to suspicious activity involving an unauthorized actor accessing one of the vendor's databases containing Farmers customer information (the "Incident")," reads the data breach notification on its website.

"The third-party vendor had monitoring tools in place, which allowed the vendor to quickly detect the activity and take appropriate containment measures, including blocking the unauthorized actor. After learning of the activity, Farmers immediately launched a comprehensive investigation to determine the nature and scope of the Incident and notified appropriate law enforcement authorities."

The company says that its investigation determined that customers' names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and/or last four digits of Social Security numbers were stolen during the breach.

Farmers began sending data breach notifications to impacted individuals on August 22, with a sample notification [1, 2] shared with the Maine Attorney General's Office, stating that a combined total of 1,111,386 customers were impacted.

While Farmers did not disclose the name of the third-party vendor, BleepingComputer has learned that the data was stolen in the widespread Salesforce data theft attacks that have impacted numerous organizations this year.

BleepingComputer contacted Farmers with additional questions about the breach and will update the story if we receive a response.

The Salesforce data theft attacks
Since the beginning of the year, threat actors classified as 'UNC6040' or 'UNC6240' have been conducting social engineering attacks on Salesforce customers.

During these attacks, threat actors conduct voice phishing (vishing) to trick employees into linking a malicious OAuth app with their company's Salesforce instances.

Once linked, the threat actors used the connection to download and steal the databases, which were then used to extort the company through email.

The extortion demands come from the ShinyHunters cybercrime group, who told BleepingComputer that the attacks involve multiple overlapping threat groups, with each group handling specific tasks to breach Salesforce instances and steal data.

"Like we have said repeatedly already, ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider are one and the same," ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer.

"They provide us with initial access and we conduct the dump and exfiltration of the Salesforce CRM instances. Just like we did with Snowflake."

Other companies impacted in these attacks include Google, Cisco, Workday, Adidas, Qantas, Allianz Life, and the LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.

bleepingcomputer.com - Hackers have released stolen data belonging to US insurance giant Allianz Life, exposing 2.8 million records with sensitive information on business partners and customers in ongoing Salesforce data theft attacks.

Last month, Allianz Life disclosed that it suffered a data breach when the personal information for the "majority" of its 1.4 million customers was stolen from a third-party, cloud-based CRM system on July 16th.

While the company did not name the provider, BleepingComputer first reported the incident was part of a wave of Salesforce-targeted thefts carried out by the ShinyHunters extortion group.
Over the weekend, ShinyHunters and other threat actors claiming overlap with "Scattered Spider" and "Lapsus$" created a Telegram channel called "ScatteredLapsuSp1d3rHunters" to taunt cybersecurity researchers, law enforcement, and journalists while taking credit for a string of high-profile breaches.

Many of these attacks had not previously been attributed to any threat actor, including the attacks on Internet Archive, Pearson, and Coinbase.

One of the attacks claimed by the threat actors is Allianz Life, for which they proceeded to leak the complete databases that were stolen from the company's Salesforce instances.

These files consist of the Salesforce "Accounts" and "Contacts" database tables, containing approximately 2.8 million data records for individual customers and business partners, such as wealth management companies, brokers, and financial advisors.

The leaked Salesforce data includes sensitive personal information, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and Tax Identification Numbers, as well as professional details like licenses, firm affiliations, product approvals, and marketing classifications.

BleepingComputer has been able to confirm with multiple people that their data in the leaked files is accurate, including their phone numbers, email addresses, tax IDs, and other information contained in the database.

BleepingComputer contacted Allianz Life about the leaked database but was told that they could not comment as the investigation is ongoing.

The Salesforce data-theft attacks
The Salesforce data theft attacks are believed to have started at the beginning of the year, with the threat actors conducting social engineering attacks to trick employees into linking a malicious OAuth app with their company's Salesforce instances.

Once linked, the threat actors used the connection to download and steal the databases, which were then used to extort the company through email.

Extortion demands were sent to the companies via email and were signed as coming from ShinyHunters. This notorious extortion group has been linked to many high-profile attacks over the years, including those against AT&T, PowerSchool, and the SnowFlake attacks.

While ShinyHunters is known to target cloud SaaS applications and website databases, they are not known for these types of social engineering attacks, causing many researchers and the media to attribute some of the Salesforce attacks to Scattered Spider.

However, ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer the "ShinyHunters" group and "Scattered Spider" are now one and the same.

"Like we have said repeatedly already, ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider are one and the same," ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer.

"They provide us with initial access and we conduct the dump and exfiltration of the Salesforce CRM instances. Just like we did with Snowflake."

It is also believed that many of the group's members share their roots in another hacking group known as Lapsus$, which was responsible for numerous attacks in 2022-2023, before some of their members were arrested.

Lapsus$ was behind breaches at Rockstar Games, Uber, 2K, Okta, T-Mobile, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and NVIDIA.

Like Scattered Spider, Lapsus$ was also adept at social engineering attacks and SIM swap attacks, allowing them to run over billion and trillion-dollar companies' IT defenses.

Over the past couple of years, there have been many arrests linked to all three collectives, so it's not clear if the current threat actors are old threat actors, new ones who have picked up the mantle, or are simply utilizing these names to plant false flags.

arstechnica.com - Disclosure comes two months after Google warned the world of ongoing spree.
In June, Google said it unearthed a campaign that was mass-compromising accounts belonging to customers of Salesforce. The means: an attacker pretending to be someone in the customer's IT department feigning some sort of problem that required immediate access to the account. Two months later, Google has disclosed that it, too, was a victim.

The series of hacks are being carried out by financially motivated threat actors out to steal data in hopes of selling it back to the targets at sky-high prices. Rather than exploiting software or website vulnerabilities, they take a much simpler approach: calling the target and asking for access. The technique has proven remarkably successful. Companies whose Salesforce instances have been breached in the campaign, Bleeping Computer reported, include Adidas, Qantas, Allianz Life, Cisco, and the LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.

Better late than never
The attackers abuse a Salesforce feature that allows customers to link their accounts to third-party apps that integrate data with in-house systems for blogging, mapping tools, and similar resources. The attackers in the campaign contact employees and instruct them to connect an external app to their Salesforce instance. As the employee complies, the attackers ask the employee for an eight-digit security code that the Salesforce interface requires before a connection is made. The attackers then use this number to gain access to the instance and all data stored in it.

Google said that its Salesforce instance was among those that were compromised. The breach occurred in June, but Google only disclosed it on Tuesday, presumably because the company only learned of it recently.

“Analysis revealed that data was retrieved by the threat actor during a small window of time before the access was cut off,” the company said.

Data retrieved by the attackers was limited to business information such as business names and contact details, which Google said was “largely public” already.

Google initially attributed the attacks to a group traced as UNC6040. The company went on to say that a second group, UNC6042, has engaged in extortion activities, “sometimes several months after” the UNC6040 intrusions. This group brands itself under the name ShinyHunters.

“In addition, we believe threat actors using the 'ShinyHunters' brand may be preparing to escalate their extortion tactics by launching a data leak site (DLS),” Google said. “These new tactics are likely intended to increase pressure on victims, including those associated with the recent UNC6040 Salesforce-related data breaches.”

With so many companies falling to this scam—including Google, which only disclosed the breach two months after it happened—the chances are good that there are many more we don’t know about. All Salesforce customers should carefully audit their instances to see what external sources have access to it. They should also implement multifactor authentication and train staff how to detect scams before they succeed.

UNC6040 uses vishing to impersonate IT support, deceiving victims into granting access to their Salesforce instances.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is tracking UNC6040, a financially motivated threat cluster that specializes in voice phishing (vishing) campaigns specifically designed to compromise organizations' Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and subsequent extortion. Over the past several months, UNC6040 has demonstrated repeated success in breaching networks by having its operators impersonate IT support personnel in convincing telephone-based social engineering engagements. This approach has proven particularly effective in tricking employees, often within English-speaking branches of multinational corporations, into actions that grant the attackers access or lead to the sharing of sensitive credentials, ultimately facilitating the theft of organization’s Salesforce data. In all observed cases, attackers relied on manipulating end users, not exploiting any vulnerability inherent to Salesforce.

A prevalent tactic in UNC6040's operations involves deceiving victims into authorizing a malicious connected app to their organization's Salesforce portal. This application is often a modified version of Salesforce’s Data Loader, not authorized by Salesforce. During a vishing call, the actor guides the victim to visit Salesforce's connected app setup page to approve a version of the Data Loader app with a name or branding that differs from the legitimate version. This step inadvertently grants UNC6040 significant capabilities to access, query, and exfiltrate sensitive information directly from the compromised Salesforce customer environments. This methodology of abusing Data Loader functionalities via malicious connected apps is consistent with recent observations detailed by Salesforce in their guidance on protecting Salesforce environments from such threats.

In some instances, extortion activities haven't been observed until several months after the initial UNC6040 intrusion activity, which could suggest that UNC6040 has partnered with a second threat actor that monetizes access to the stolen data. During these extortion attempts, the actor has claimed affiliation with the well-known hacking group ShinyHunters, likely as a method to increase pressure on their victims.