On the morning of 6 October, thousands of people who shop at ASOS had a reason to open the app that had nothing to do with clothes. A push notification headed "ASOS HACKED" landed on their home screens. It was addressed to the company's data protection officer and IT team, and it read: "We have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it," according to the BBC.
Charlotte Wilson of Check Point told the BBC the attackers had "turned Asos' own app into their ransom note." The thing they claimed to hold was not a single file or a single account. It was the customer data warehouse: the place where a large company pools what it knows about the people who buy from it.
What happened in the ASOS hack?
ASOS confirmed that an "unauthorised customer notification" went out at around 10:00 BST and said it was investigating "unauthorised activity involving third-party platforms that we use to communicate with customers," SecurityWeek reported. The company said names and contact details "may have been accessed" and that it did not believe payment cards or account passwords were affected.
The group behind the message calls itself the Xuanye Group, and cyber experts told the Guardian they had not heard of it before. Snowflake told the BBC that its investigation was ongoing and it had so far found "no compromise" of its own platform. The full extent of what was taken is unconfirmed.
What is known is the scale of what sits behind the door. ASOS serves around 17 million customers a year in more than 150 markets, the BBC reported, and its shares fell by about a tenth on the day. Malwarebytes noted that ASOS's marketing runs on Simon AI, a personalisation tool built on Snowflake, whose customer profiles cover purchase history, customer value and segments such as lapsed buyers. Dan Bird of Horizon3 told the BBC that sending the notification required access to a system separate from Snowflake: "If both claims hold up, it suggests the attackers got hold of credentials that opened more than one door."
Why do customer data warehouses keep getting breached?
Companies build data warehouses on purpose. Orders, addresses, call logs, loyalty status and browsing history are copied out of many systems into one place so analysts and marketing tools can query them together. The same design makes the warehouse valuable to an attacker, because one login can reach years of records about millions of people.
The 2024 Snowflake campaign showed how that plays out. Mandiant, Google's incident response team, found that a group it tracks as UNC5537 logged in to Snowflake customer accounts with usernames and passwords stolen by infostealer malware, some taken as far back as 2020. Mandiant and Snowflake notified about 165 potentially exposed organisations, and Mandiant found no evidence that Snowflake's own corporate environment had been breached. The weak point was the customer's login, and behind each login sat everything.
AT&T was the starkest case. The company disclosed in July 2024 that call and text records for "nearly all" of its cellular customers had been taken from its account on the platform, CNN reported. AT&T later paid a member of the hacking team about $370,000 to delete the data, according to Wired. Ticketmaster and Santander were also linked to the same wave of attacks, the BBC noted.
How AI changes the warehouse attack
These incidents reveal the prize attackers are pursuing. AI changes the speed, scale and precision with which they can pursue it.
In a campaign Anthropic disclosed in November 2025, human operators directed its Claude Code tool to inspect target systems and spot "the highest-value databases," work Anthropic said took "a fraction of the time it would've taken a team of human hackers." The tool then harvested credentials, extracted private data and sorted it "according to its intelligence value" before reporting back. People chose the targets. The AI did the searching and sorting at machine speed.
A data warehouse is an especially powerful target for that kind of tool. Everything is already collected, labelled and queryable. An attacker who once needed days to understand what a stolen login could reach can now have an agent map it, rank it and export it in a single session.
What is Untrace?
The answer is not another lock on the same door. It is changing what exists behind it.
This is the problem Untrace is built to solve. Some data has to stay queryable. Much of the most sensitive material a company keeps does not: passport and ID scans, signed contracts, medical files, the documents behind a customer's account. Untrace is file storage designed so that no single storage provider ever holds enough to reconstruct a file. The idea goes back to Adi Shamir's 1979 paper How to Share a Secret: split a secret into pieces so that a set number of them rebuild it and fewer cannot.
In the current Untrace architecture, each file is encrypted in the browser before it is stored, then divided into six encrypted shards distributed across three independent providers. Any three shards can reconstruct the file. Fewer than three cannot.
What problems does Untrace solve?
One stolen login does not open an entire collection. A compromised warehouse account can expose vast numbers of records at once. With Untrace, rebuilding a file takes the user's passkey, and the passkey asks for the person at the device, by fingerprint, face or PIN. There are no API keys or agent tokens that open stored files.
A breached provider holds fragments, not files. No single provider holds enough shards to reconstruct a file. An attacker who compromises one storage provider finds encrypted fragments, not complete passports, contracts or customer documents.
The storage companies cannot read what they hold. Files are encrypted in the browser and part of the key comes from the user's passkey, so the providers storing the shards only ever see encrypted pieces.
One provider going down does not take the files with it. With six shards in the system and any three needed to rebuild a file, files stay available when one provider is offline.
The warehouse model rewards the attacker for finding one door. Untrace is designed so there is no single room full of complete files behind it.
Originally published at untrace.network.
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