it sounds like they built the support tool (with its unfortunate name) such that it places limited trust in support contractors and the information technology that supports them. because of this they're able to identify potentially affected customers and even audit all activities that have taken place. in other words, the system worked as designed.
this is very different (and orders of magnitude less severe) than an actual compromise of the production service itself.
It doesn't matter if they did it by fooling or paying a low level CS rep to get access to their account vs. using their 'leet hacking skillz' to pwn the electronic defenses. A breach is a breach and the CSO of all people has to own up to that fact.
"This is an application built with least privilege in mind to ensure that support engineers are granted only the specific access they require to perform their roles. They are unable to create or delete users. They cannot download customer databases."
not being able to create or delete users seems a far cry from "near full admin access."
But at least changing passwords of existing accounts seemed possible according to the screenshots, perhaps disabling 2FA as well.
As long as Okta does not provide a list of what the user was able to do, we don't know
I can't see any place in the screenshots where they are setting a user's password, only sending reset links (which would do nothing if the support user does not have access to system email or end users email).
Also at my workplace, 2FA is not enforced by an IdP (like Okta), but by our own application (and therefore could not be disabled at the IdP level).
As others have mentioned, the slack access is potentially more concerning.
If Okta has implemented a BeyondCorp model, the attackers had access with known limits. It doesn't matter how much access if the machine they've accessed is itself untrusted. That's the punchline of an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks where they allowed an evil computer to take over the lighting systems on a starship; while they repaired the ship, all the computer could do was flick the lights on and off angrily.
You can be a security expert and no tech company will care unless you cram leetcode non-stop.
On the plus side the lack of security focus makes for a lot of opportunities for the stock market when betting against overvalued tech companies with this problem!
one day there will probably be professional engineering certifications for software engineers, and those certifications will largely center around building secure software and systems. (with maybe some focus on safety critical systems as well)
it's funny when you think about how young the field is.
The idea that at a security focused company they are passing around secrets via public slack channels is wild. That’s the thing they need to address.
From the article:
> The majority of support engineering tasks are performed using an internally-built application called SuperUser or SU for short, which is used to perform basic management functions of Okta customer tenants. This does not provide “god-like access” to all its users. This is an application built with least privilege in mind to ensure that support engineers are granted only the specific access they require to perform their roles. They are unable to create or delete users. They cannot download customer databases. They cannot access our source code repositories.
Most commercial services allow unauthenticated password reset just by hitting a web form. It would send a password reset link to the correct place and the person would either ignore it, follow through and have a new password or report it. It doesn’t impact the service access at all.
Meanwhile creating an account would allow new access to the system. I’m having a hard time figuring out how that’s not a world of difference?
Support _Engineer_ that is using a prebuilt application to do stuff like reset MFA. In what world does this have anything to do with engineering?
To simplify: The hackers had minimal access to stuff and couldn’t do much.
Not defending Okta's response here; I think it has been quite terrible.
I like how it just glosses over access to all the other tools which often contain a treasure trove of data. Just Slack can give an attacker worst case credentials pasted into channels and best case loads of information for more targeted social engineering attacks. LAPSUS$ even stated they had access to over 8K channels.
It was a customer service rep who could send password reset emails.
Systems listed were that app and SaaS offerings. The laptop was vendor owned and managed.
Given my experience, it probably had 0 access to anything “inside” Okta. There was no mention of vendor VPN or Virtual Desktop access. Or access to any internal system beyond what was a horribly named call center support tool.
They really wouldn’t have passed the necessary audits for their enterprise and government customer base if they allowed 3rd party devices “real” access.
Beyond a “hacker” getting access, there is very little trust in (likely) contract employees of a contract company.
The fact that the tool is named Super User is killing them more than anything here.
The only way one can reach this conclusion is by ignoring all the breaches / CVEs that happened in large companies during the past few years.
Nowadays I just assume every company is crap at security unless proven otherwise.
Yes, most companies are bad at security. Some aren't though. The problem right now is figuring out which ones are - there's very little signal.
We all know it is very uncommon to do a great job. Everyone has been breached sooner or later. Any anyone who has worked in engineering or security in tech companies knows how often security concerns are underprioritized far behind more visible but less important work.
Hedging is a good answer. Relying on a single point of failure that, if it ever fails open, will expose everything at once? Not a smart idea.
At this point, it would be helpful for Okta to stop using the term "breached", because apparently they aren't using the word in the same way everyone else is, and it's a point of contention.
> the Okta service has not been breached
If you consider the Okta service as the infrastructure acutally providing auth services to customers - then it wasn't breached. Only Okta support services were breached and that did not (going with Okta's line here) actually allow for somebody to access the actual Okta auth services.
Okta is intentionally using their own definition to down-play what’s happened.
A breach is simply ‘to overcome defences’ (ie to get access to something you shouldn’t). In this case their defence against someone else accessing the super user application was the support employee and their credentials, but this defence was clearly overcome by the hackers.
I agree that they need to stop using the word.
The most likely reason they dont wanna use the common sense term "breached" is because it implies legally a breach of contract, which means liability and getting sued and having to show up in front of congress.
Very sad to see their response be so intransparent and flawed. I wish technical people would be more involved in writing these responses, not lawyers.
There is plenty concerning about their response to this situation, and this phrasing can be confusing, but from my POV in the industry this choice of words is understandable.
"superuser" is a tool which can be used for various tasks. It is not the same thing as "full super user access". As I understand it, the tool superuser doesn't allow you to do whatever you want, like accessing any piece of data in the databases. It is used by their support engineers.
Not trying to say there was no impact, but "full super user access" traditionally implies more than being able to run one specific tool with the name superuser.
I think people who have written about this and looked at the screen shots has been sloppy and spread misinformation.
"In this post, I want to provide a timeline and my perspective on what has transpired, and where we are today with this investigation. I hope that it will illuminate why I am confident in our conclusions that the Okta service has not been breached and there are no corrective actions that need to be taken by our customers."
And then go on to write paragraphs of detail and a timeline that explicitly shows for a five day period an unauthorized user had full super user access to the service.
He explicitly says, "The report from the forensic firm highlighted that there was a five-day window of time between January 16-21, 2022 when the threat actor had access to the Sitel environment, which we validated with our own analysis."
This is some unbelievable double speak to try to claim that Okta was not breached. Any trust I had in this company is completely in the toilet, just based on this response. How is the CEO not responding to this too? The hole just keeps getting dug deeper the more they say.