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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

These screenshots don’t look very sophisticated. Does okta even have a scheduling solution? Who was clicking these links, engineers? Is it normal for Twilio to send corporate communications like this over text (at least without a good reason & an email warning it’s coming and verifiable details)?

I’m also curious how much customer data an attacker should have been able to get into from outside. Is there no 2fa-auth vpn needed to get in? Or is there just lots of customer data hanging out in email/whatever?

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SMS- or TOTP-based 2FA doesn't save you here. The phishing site is designed to look like the real login form. The victim enters their username and password, and the phishing site forwards the username and password to the real site's login form, which triggers the "real" 2FA process. Victim enters a TOTP code (or SMS code) into the fake site, and boom, the attackers now have a valid username, password, and 2FA code, as long as they use it quickly enough. Assuming they do, then they have a valid session cookie that they can use wherever they like, which can often be refreshed before expiration without re-authing.

The only 2FA that protects against this is a hardware token, like a Yubikey, if used in U2F/FIDO2 mode. Twilio does use Yubikeys for some roles and access types, but not all, and presumably there was enough sensitive data that was only gated by TOTP 2FA.

I think in this day and age, if I were running a company infosec department, I would mandate U2F/FIDO2 for access to every system, and try to structure things so employees don't need to access company systems on their mobile device. (Yes, I know it's possible to do hardware 2FA on mobile, but I feel like it'd create a large IT support burden since it's not always so straightforward.) And if there are company services that aren't suitable for hardware 2FA, they need to be rare exceptions that are granted, and need to be firewalled off from the rest of the company.

VPNs are so 2010s. They just add friction and a false sense of security (the way they're traditionally implemented - VPN is "trusted" and everything behind is open access), and an amazing point of entry for attackers.

A "zero trust" approach where nothing is trusted and you pass through an SSO with MFA like Okta is better in that Okta do a better job in security than "random network team running an unpatched firewall from vendor X" do on average. And each service has an auth layer and doesn't implicitly trust some IPs are good.

In any case, a phishing that captures login+password+mfa means game over in both scenarios.

100000x Incorrect. VPNs add a layer of security at the network level. You do not rely SOLELY on a VPN. You add it to drop network traffic that does not belong, decreasing the noise level in other logs, highlighting threats elsewhere.

This is one of the worst pieces of advice to be repeated ad deafenun.

The thing is that VPNs are usually deployed in the way i described. No ACLs, everyone on the VPN is "trusted" regardless of position and role, with services behind often relying on the fact that the VPN is securing them.

“Trusted” does not mean authorized. I have never seen any (corporate) environment that uses VPN and not require some form of authentication & authorization on top. With “trusted” status often grants those trusted users read only access to internal communication or documentation.

Utilizing VPN as _a_ layer of network security with additional systems access security is something we learned in the old pre-2020s era, and I’ve never seen a cavalier system like you’ve described deployed. But maybe it’s just because I’m not up to date on “state-of-the-art” 2020s systems.

In practice VPNs are a very visible layer that people will tend to rely on when they decide what security measures to implement. They are very clunky, so people end up assuming that they must provide quite a lot of security, to be worth enduring.

Do you have any sources for this claim? Are there any stats about VPN deployments anywhere? I have never seen a VPN deployed in this way. Who are the companies that do this? Mom and pop shops with a two employees? Or 1990s corporations which were blissfully unaware of online threats?

Not sure where you're getting this idea. I've never been on a VPN where services inside the VPN all just assumed I was allowed to be there. Internal services still at least required a username and password, and some would require 2FA as well.

I'm sure there are some VPNs that are implemented a poorly as you describe, but I'm not sure that's the common case like you seem to think.

> VPNs add a layer of security at the network level

Which you get from TLS. Strong authentication and authorization per-web-application using short-lived tokens through OAuth/OIDC is about a billion times more robust than any VPN network security.

90% of what VPNs are useful for is connecting you to a non-routable network.

This is also very very incorrect! Think about it, how come people in Iran/China use VPNs to access the outside work? If TLS were sufficient for privacy, your claim would be correct, but this is very far from reality.

TLS is another _layer_ of security, but it still reveals who you are talking to via SNI and DNS queries, and worse: how often you are talking to them.

That's kinda a different thing, though. People using VPNs to circumvent national internet restrictions is one thing. Securing a corporate network is another.

You can use TLS to secure a VPN connection from state actors. You can also use TLS 1.3 to avoid SNI, and DNS over HTTPS (or just use DNS over a tunneled connection). But I'm talking about how you don't need a VPN for a business purpose.

Of course they're sophisticated if you don't regularly review SSL trust chains and secure DNS. And "funny looking characters" and all that. Which is most people on this planet. And Twilio had a lot of business and customer facing non-engineer users.

It's another story that will drum up support for another integrated authentication system. I say this as someone who was recently targeted in an attack.

It's peek-a-boo, I get that, but damn is it frustrating.

But they'll get what they want. They'll get their secure system.

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