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> 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.

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.

A person who should not have had access to the system gained near full admin access for five whole days. That is the textbook definition of a breach of security.

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.

> A person who should not have had access to the system gained near full admin access for five whole days.

"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."

Why? We only know that they are not able to create new users.

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

At my own workplace (a SaaS service), we cannot change passwords, we can only send reset links (and the reset email goes to the end user).

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).

Is your workplace Okta? They built a custom internal tool. Until they enumerate exactly what the attacker had access to it’s hard to infer anything.

The article specifically addresses this, right? They log every interaction from support engineers and are going to report to the affected customers what actions were performed.

As others have mentioned, the slack access is potentially more concerning.

How do you send a reset password email with a SSO platform that gates email?

If you have 2FA a OTP can be sent to a trusted device or app to allow a password reset without having access to email?

Based on the screenshots and Okta's description (which absolutely needs to be more clear), the attacker couldn't directly change passwords, they could only trigger password reset emails.

The linked article states that SuperUser is the name of their internal software. It's a confusing name, but at no point did the attacker have access to "near full admin access", based off the report.

The relevant question is "near-full admin access of a system that does what?"

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.

On the topic of 'leet hacking skillz' I personally find it strange that so many Silicon Valley companies only care abut leetcode for the interview process.

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!

security design is pretty much the only thing that resembles real engineering in software. other than safety critical systems, it's pretty much the most common thing that can actually go wrong and harm people.

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 screenshots by the attacking group claimed to have access to thousands of slack channels, many of which they say included API keys. It's likely that some or many of those were to prod services.

This is the actual egregious thing in the breach. All of the support tool stuff seems like it was acting as designed and prevented the breach for sprawling.

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.

> an unauthorized user had full super user access to the service

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.

From circulating screenshots, and the omission in the listing here, it looks like they used this account to reset user passwords and MFA on a bunch of tenants. Not being able to create or delete users is meaningless.

Fair call. That's an important clarification.

Why is it a meaningless distinction to prevent account creation but allow password reset?

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?

Apparently the "password reset" is more of a "password set" feature.

Where was that outlined? All of the screen dumps I saw showed what looked like a reset.

Why is password reset considered a big issue? If I know your email / login I can go reset your password for a bunch of stuff now without any breach.

Kinda unrelated, but how did job title inflation get this bad?

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?

Nope. You are just not understanding it.

To simplify: The hackers had minimal access to stuff and couldn’t do much.

They could see the names and contacts of employees at Okta’s customers and reset their credentials at a bare minimum per the leaked screenshot. That doesn’t seem that minimal?

Based on the screenshots, they could trigger password reset emails. They couldn't directly set the new password.

Not defending Okta's response here; I think it has been quite terrible.

The CSO is implying that the super user was able to get into the system but did not have access to sensitive data, or at least did not exfiltrate that data. It's possible if their defenses are layered enough. The security model is defense in depth, rather than the "moat" concept of hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Micro-breaches are expected; it's about detecting and mitigating them. I'm not saying the CSO is telling the truth, but that's how you reconcile someone having access to the system without accessing sensitive data.

> Support engineers use a number of customer support tools to get their job done including Okta’s instances of Jira, Slack, Splunk, RingCentral, and support tickets through Salesforce.

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.

Reading the other trending article on LAPSUS$ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30774406), access to Slack suits their MO perfectly in terms of mining it for data for more sophisticated escalation of access via social engineering.

I view this hack as a public service - we're seeing how awfully these big security companies actually handle security in the worst case. Let that be a lesson to everyone who is in favour of mass centralisation. There needs to be a security solution where Okta essentially provides the skeleton of the infrastructure but not the entire solution, such that an Okta compromise does not compromise everyone who uses them.

It's wild that apparently near full admin access to the service was handed out to subcontractors of subcontractors. There was so little oversight and so many levels of indirection that it took months to figure out the full impact of the breach and incident. This does not seem like a healthy or responsible security policy for a company whose primary business is... authentication security.

But it was cheap!

No, definitely not full admin access. Just a support tool called “SuperUser”.

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.

And don't forget that they meet all the governments BS standards and auditing checks. So lots of government contractors use them.

One company doing a bad job does not mean it's impossible or even uncommon to do a good job. Also, if you wanted to hedge against Okta... feel free. You can U2F 2FA your services behind Okta or in front of it. We use GSuite SSO, but everywhere we can set 2FA outside of it we do so.

While true, Okta isn't some minor player that we can just wave away like this. I bet lots of other similar big companies will have similar issues - this is about much more than just their technical merit.

> does not mean it's impossible or even uncommon to do a good job.

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.

I'm pretty up on my breaches :)

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.

> One company doing a bad job does not mean it's impossible or even uncommon to do a good job.

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.

Sounds like the main point of disagreement is the definition of a single word, "breached". Otherwise, everyone is in agreement about what happened, right? I agree with your definition of the word for whatever it's worth.

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.

Everyone else is using the plain English definition because it’s accurate.

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.

Agreed. It's obvious that lawyers are deeply involved already at this point.

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.

The breach is technical in nature. The disclosure and response is a legal matter.

I actually think the definitional conflict might be on the term "Okta service" -

> 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.

They dont wanna use the word "breached" because lawyers write these things - and legally breach has a different meaning than security wise. Very sad that they already prepare on the legal front rather then being open and transparent.

Was coming around to make this point that in the cybersecurity world the word "breach" can have a very particular meaning with legal implications. As a cybersecurity professional, we are trained not to refer to anything as a breach while communicating findings of investigations or alerting organizations to activities that we see unless that has already been legally established.

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.

I think you have misunderstood at least parts of it.

"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.

I’m finding it hard to figure out what the role of a CSO is after this incident. They seem to be the least knowledgeable about the product they’re creating as to offer the highest degree of plausible deniability possible.

I believe part of the job description for CxO jobs is "willing to bend reality as per needs of the company"

At least he didn't blame the intern...