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Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by vinay_ys on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @05:23AM (#30764151)
People outsource auth to a specialised company (okta) and they outsource tier-1/2 support to a specialised company (because they are a multi-tenant B2B SaaS co.) If this were not a SaaS product, instead was a well-tested, audited and certified software package that was bought and run in-house by FTEs (and audited periodically), this additional complexity could have been avoided and this breach would have been much harder.

As an industry I don't know if we have made rational choices along the way.

Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by sofixa on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @05:57AM (#30764348)
For most companies, hiring good quality FTEs is complicated, and very expensive. It makes sense, in many cases, to delegate some things to external vendors ( SaaS companies). There is a line to be drawn somewhere, and it will vary between companies and industries - e.g. a tech company could probably easily handle auth in-house, while i wouldn't expect a law firm or whatever to handle that ( and i wouldn't want them to).
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by game_the0ry on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @10:57AM (#30766864)
> For most companies, hiring good quality FTEs is complicated, and very expensive.

This is cope - managers repeat this narrative so they can blame some other factor rather than having to put in the work to fix the problem of hiring good FTEs. Unfortunately, this narrative has been repeated so often that it is perceived to be axiomatic, which is why it is repeated without any criticism.

No, its not that hard to find good FTEs, you just haven't tried hard enough, or you're not paying enough, or your glassdoor reviews are bad.

Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by cupofpython on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:28PM (#30768135)
>or you're not paying enough

this is not a negligible barrier. Sure you could argue that a business that isnt successful enough to hire for that expensive FTE maybe shouldnt exist at all, but a lot more is possible by being able to outsource it. And there really isnt a good reason why it cannot be outsourced from an operations standpoint - it is entirely a security problem. It's not like auth is hard to do for a third party.

Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by maxerickson on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @06:53AM (#30764634)
Yeah, it's not surpising at all that someone managed to build a business selling auth for less than hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by entropea on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @07:24AM (#30764782)
Probably a lot cheaper than the fire pit they just walked into.
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by epicide on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @10:24AM (#30766448)
In the long run, yes. But people are often promoted mostly based on short term impacts. Especially visible ones.

e.g. nobody got a promotion because the change they pushed for 5 years ago prevented an attack today.

That's not to say people are just greedy and only chase what gets them a promotion, but replace "promotion" with "received positive feedback".

Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by emteycz on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @05:38AM (#30764239)
As an industry, we have abundance of choice. You're not practically nor theoretically locked to SaaS vendors - there are equally good self-hosted open source auth solutions.

A portion of our industry seems to be bad at risk calculation, but that's not inherent to the SaaS model - this app very well could've been made with strictly separated tenants.

Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by gnz11 on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @05:58AM (#30764355)
Realistically though we are often locked into terrible software that no one wants because a SVP was wined and dined by the vendor.
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by ricardobayes on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @07:50AM (#30764919)
Definitely not and it will hit us big time imho. We are one freak incident away from abandoning npm/pypi completely and completely re-thinking how libraries are being done/used.
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by lupire on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @09:02AM (#30765510)
If Okta can't hire competent staff and build a secure environment, how can you expect every other company in the world to do so?

> well-tested, audited and certified software package

Who is selling this?

Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by shahbaby on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @09:14AM (#30765645)
To be fair to Okta, nothing is ever 100% secure.
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by DyslexicAtheist on Thursday March 24, 2022 @03:42AM (#30787189)
that is such a lazy statement
Re:Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems by api on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @07:37AM (#30764840)
JavaScript is the most popular language. We have not made rational choices at all.