Salesloft Drift attacks hit Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler

Multiple security and technology companies have been swept up in a far-reaching attack spree originating at Salesloft Drift, including Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Palo Alto Networks, SpyCloud and Zscaler. 

Victim organizations continue to come forward as customers of the third-party AI chat agent hunt for evidence of compromise or receive notices from Salesloft and other companies involved in response, recovery and ongoing attack investigations. 

Salesloft initially claimed exposure was limited to customers integrated with Salesforce. Yet, Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant Consulting — Google’s incident response firm which is now working with Salesloft — said any platform integrated with Drift is potentially compromised. 

The root cause of the attacks, specifically how the threat group that Google tracks as UNC6395 gained initial access to Salesloft Drift, remains unconfirmed. “There is no evidence of any unusual or malicious activity with the Salesloft platform,” Salesloft said in an update Saturday.

On Monday, the company said “Drift will be taken offline in the very near future,” rendering the platform inaccessible and the Drift chatbot unavailable on customer websites. “This will provide the fastest path forward to comprehensively review the application and build additional resiliency and security in the system to return the application to full functionality,” the company added.

Salesloft, which acquired Drift in February 2024, has not responded to requests for comment since news of the attacks first surfaced last week. 

The company announced an agreement to merge with Clari, a competitor in the customer-relationship management space, one day before the attacks started Aug. 8. In the merger announcement, the combined companies said they will serve more than 5,000 organizations globally across all industries.

The exposure caused by the attacks has cast widespread concern, as customers seek clarity about the unfolding disaster. Salesloft customers are assessing if they were impacted, and then sifting through data to determine the extent to which they or their customers were compromised. 

The attacks did not hit every Salesloft Drift customer. Some Salesloft Drift customers, when contacted by CyberScoop, confirmed they were not implicated by the attacks and found no evidence that corporate or customer data was compromised. 

Okta said it was not impacted by the incident, but confirmed it was a target based on indicators of compromise Google Threat Intelligence Group shared last week. “The threat actor attempted to use a compromised token to access our Salesforce instance, but the attack failed because the connection originated from an unauthorized IP address,” the company said in a blog post Tuesday.

Many other businesses were less fortunate.

Sam Curry, chief information security officer at Zscaler, said the company’s Salesloft Drift integration with Salesforce was the point of unauthorized access. The company was using Salesloft Drift integrated with other platforms, but they were not impacted, he added. 

Data on a large number of Zscaler’s customers was exposed, including names, business email addresses, job titles, phone numbers, location details, Zscaler product licensing and commercial information, and plain text content from some support cases. 

“No product, service, or infrastructure was affected,” Curry said. “We are looking to hear from Salesloft Drift and from Salesforce if there are any other findings since this happened in their infrastructure.”

Curry said Zscaler was already in the process of ending its relationship with Salesloft Drift for unrelated reasons. 

Palo Alto Networks on Tuesday confirmed that it, too, was one of hundreds of organizations impacted by the supply chain attack. The company’s incident response business Unit 42 confirmed the incident was limited to its Salesforce environment, adding that no Palo Alto Networks products or services were impacted. 

“Most of the exfiltrated data was business contact information,” a Palo Alto Networks spokesperson told CyberScoop in an email. “However, a small number of customers who included sensitive information, such as credentials, in their recent case notes might also have had that data compromised.”

Cloudflare said any information customers shared with the company’s support system — including logs, tokens or passwords — should be considered compromised. The company said it found 104 Cloudflare API tokens in the compromised data and, while it found no evidence of abuse, rotated the tokens out of an abundance of caution.

The company also maintained that no Cloudflare services or infrastructure were compromised. 

“We are responsible for the choice of tools we use in support of our business,” a group of Cloudflare security leaders said in a blog post Tuesday. “This breach has let our customers down. For that, we sincerely apologize.”

Former Salesloft Drift customers were impacted as well. In a blog post announcing some data contained in its Salesforce environment was exposed, SpyCloud said it was previously a customer of Salesloft and Drift, but not currently.

Google previously said the data theft campaign occurred over a 10-day period last month, potentially impacting more than 700 organizations.