MC: Yeah. Like, we do not even name it Okta. We simply name it Single Signal-On as a result of that is the best way it performs for us.
LN: Precisely.
MC: So what number of firms are on Okta? Like, what number of firms use it?
LN: Okta says it has greater than 14,000 prospects. So lots of people, numerous organizations, numerous layers of dependency on this. It is all hinging on this one level.
MC: And now, please inform us what was the hack? What did Lapsus$ do to Okta?
LN: So what truly occurred isn’t solely a direct hack of Okta. Like many firms, Okta works with numerous companions to assist handle its enterprise, like course of knowledge, their contractors principally, and Okta calls them subprocessors. However as a result of an organization like Okta is so essential, and it is coping with such delicate data—it is such a delicate mechanism is what I am making an attempt to say—they do not have numerous subprocessors. It is solely a couple of dozen, and so they’re all type of massive names—AWS, issues like that—who they’re working with. However considered one of them is definitely the group that was first compromised to get to a privileged Okta account. So it is type of like a two-step course of to get there. And that group is known as Sitel, and notably a division that Sitel acquired, referred to as Sykes.
So the hackers focused an worker inside Sykes Sitel who had privileged entry to do customer support and take care of Okta purchasers and knowledge. And so they compromised that account. And in doing so, which means though a trove of passwords wasn’t straight compromised, you are getting numerous privileges, proper? Lots of energy from that account, as a result of, for instance, that account was empowered to reset passwords and reset multifactor authentication. So though you did not know what the previous password was essentially, and so they’re not simply accessing like a plaintext checklist of all people’s password at 14,000 firms or one thing like that, the account was giving the attackers the power to say, “OK, nicely, I do not care, as a result of I am simply going to set a brand new password, and I’ll take away this multifactor authentication and set my very own multifactor authentication” or no matter it’s.
And so that’s the hazard, and why this was such a large revelation, as a result of as we’ll discuss, Lapsus$ has additionally compromised numerous different massive firms. Okta and Sitel aren’t alone, however there’s type of this extra significance and this extra potential threat for Sitel and Okta due to Okta’s place inside so many different firms.
MC: Yeah. Are you able to inform us extra about Lapsus$? How lengthy have they been aroun,d and the way did they arrive to our consideration?
LN: The group may be very fascinating. They’ve a really chaotic vitality. They emerged at the least within the kind that we now know them in December. And in just some months, they’ve simply been on this rampage, this tear, and ramping up the scale and significance of the organizations they’re concentrating on. In order that they began out concentrating on like media firms, some ecommerce websites—massive firms in themselves, it is to not diminish it. Some in South America, some within the UK, a bit of bit throughout Europe, however then simply type of took an enormous leap sooner or later to start out grabbing knowledge from firms like Nvidia and Samsung, and clearly it is saved escalating to Okta. But additionally the identical day that they introduced or type of leaked screenshots indicating that they’d this type of compromise of Okta, additionally they began dumping supply code stolen from Microsoft associated to Bing, Bing Maps, and Cortana.
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