The tone of this is fine. What isn't fine is that Cloudflare isn't dropping Okta. I might consider dropping Okta.
If they keep undermining the 'security' bits they will 100% get ditched. Assuming there is a credible alternative. But I'd argue there isn't a credible alternative at the moment (on either the security or non-security front).
If you listed all of the 'security forward' SaaS companies you can think of. I guarantee 3/4 use Okta. I also bet all would be keen to switch as soon as an alternative was reasonably 2x better on either the 'security' or 'non-security' fronts. Even given the massive pain in the bum it would be to migrate. No one loves Okta or their sales team.
The dumbest guidance your security architect could have given was "Okta got hacked by actors that don't care about us. We should move to ${SOLUTION} that is objectively worse for users and probably worse for security"
No they won’t. This is my point - the ‘security’ bit isnt even on the radar of 3/4 of those companies. Compliance is
We were using a different solution at that point and planning a move TO okta. It wasn’t just about the fact it was hacked (happens to the best of us) but how they got hacked, how they found out and how they responded all of which made immediately clear what a nightmare it was/is
First, Okta should get credit for publicly acknowledging the compromise.
Second, expecting any company or organization to never get hacked is unrealistic. Organizations which are transparent and acknowledge their security breaches should get credit for it. Organizations which cover things up should be avoided.
Third, no one knows how to build secure software or services. The closest anyone has gotten is Open BSD but it can still be hacked once you install software on it.
Forth, the number of publicly acknowledged breaches does not tell us anything about Okta’s security. Here is why:
- We do not know how many breaches each authentication provider has had
- We do not know how many breaches were never detected by the authentication provider
- We do not know why the breaches occurred. Breach causes can range from gross incompetence to “WOW, that attacker was really clever and found a new class of security bugs”.
- We do not know how Okta responded to the breach. We also don’t know how its competitors respond to their breaches.
My main point is security is hard and measuring security is also hard. We cannot use simple metrics to determine if an organization is a good organization or a bad one.
"In early October 2023, Okta was notified of a breach resulting in hackers stealing HTTP access tokens from Okra's support platform by BeyondTrust. Okta CTO Charlotte Wylie denied the incident for a number of weeks, but later recognized that a breach had occurred"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okta,_Inc.#cite_note-33
"Okta’s Wylie declined to answer questions about how long the intruder may have had access to the company’s case management account"
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/10/hackers-stole-access-tok...
What????
They would reasonably face civil suits if they didn't.
[0] - https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-chief-security-o...
Where "out there" is Okta. You are basically saying: Don't leave sensitive data with Okta.
I would also suggest that each of the companies that publicly posted have something to gain from doing so. We also don't know if they are telling the full story. Using the "we told okta on X date" as assuming that starts the clock on okta not disclosing a breach to the public is a pretty ridiculous take.
We still don't know the full circumstances of how this happened and Okta has not yet publicly commented on their side of this story. Presumably because the investigation is ongoing. But reading the details in the cloudfare post, access for the breach stopped on the 18th and okta told customers on the 19th. Is okta supposed to alert customers of every single report of a breach, every report that might have some credibility, etc...? Maybe there are process improvements to be made in the review process, but we have no visibility into the current level of effort they are making.
Meanwhile, other companies have had known issues for months/years (keyword is KNOWN) before disclosing. I don't want to be a victim of this more than anyone else, but I think we need to be more reasonable in our "hot takes" to these situations even if we are calling for continued improvement.
That is not an argument one would want to hear from a company whose only reason for existence is being good at security.
The security bugs are not there because of incompetence or stupidity. They are there because security is really hard and it is even harder to get every software engineer to care about security.
If the best organizations in the industry make security mistakes, what makes you think the rest don’t either?
Reality is often unpleasant. It is better to acknowledge it than to pretend it does not exist.
Perfect security is impossible, but better than 50% odds of never getting critically compromised are reasonable to expect.
If their security is not good enough, their value quickly becomes negative. Not only are they already a gigantic target and a single point of failure, but by being visibly bad at security they are standing in the spotlight with "hack me" on their back.
(If Okta was zero-dayed, IMO we'd have heard about it. Great way to shift blame.)