Okta Cybersecurity Breach Wipes Out More Than $2 Billion In Market Cap (cnbc.com) 40
Since disclosing a security breach of its support systems Friday, Okta has shed more than $2 billion from its market valuation "Okta shares slumped more than 11% Friday after the company said an unidentified hacking group was able to access client files through a support system," reports CNBC. "The company did not provide more details beyond a set of technical identifiers. The company's stock continued to fall in Monday trading, ultimately closing down 8.1%." From the report: Okta is a lesser-known name but forms a critical part of cybersecurity systems at major corporations. The identity management company boasts more than 18,000 customers who use its products to provide a single login point for many different platforms that a given company uses. Zoom, for example, uses Okta to give "seamless" access through a single login to the company's Google Workspace, ServiceNow, VMware and Workday platforms. Okta said it had communicated with all affected clients in Friday's announcement. At least one of those clients said it had alerted Okta about a potential breach weeks earlier. [...]
Okta has also been at the center of other higher-profile incidents. Earlier this year, for example, casino giants Caesars and MGM were both affected by hacks. Caesars was forced to pay millions in ransom to the hacking group, sources told CNBC. MGM had to shut down critical systems that the company acknowledged would have a material effect on its bottom line in an SEC filing. The direct and indirect losses from those incidents totaled over $100 million. Both those attacks targeted MGM and Caesars' Okta installations, using a sophisticated social engineering attack that went through IT help desks. Three other companies were also targeted by the hacking group, an Okta executive told Reuters.
Okta has also been a target before. A hacking group purportedly accessed numerous Okta systems in a March attempt. That group, Lapsus$, has been tied to hacking attacks at Uber and Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, according to a report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Okta has also been at the center of other higher-profile incidents. Earlier this year, for example, casino giants Caesars and MGM were both affected by hacks. Caesars was forced to pay millions in ransom to the hacking group, sources told CNBC. MGM had to shut down critical systems that the company acknowledged would have a material effect on its bottom line in an SEC filing. The direct and indirect losses from those incidents totaled over $100 million. Both those attacks targeted MGM and Caesars' Okta installations, using a sophisticated social engineering attack that went through IT help desks. Three other companies were also targeted by the hacking group, an Okta executive told Reuters.
Okta has also been a target before. A hacking group purportedly accessed numerous Okta systems in a March attempt. That group, Lapsus$, has been tied to hacking attacks at Uber and Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, according to a report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Good time to pick up shares (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good time to pick up shares (Score:5, Insightful)
The problems I see with Okta, is that they want to also be the password authority. Putting all your eggs in one basket isnt a good idea, especially when the eggs are in the cloud and handled by a third party company like this.
Cloud services are just as flawed as everything else, the problem isnt that they will get hacked, its that if they do, there are plenty of companies that are tied to it. Its just like the Solarwinds hack, you hack the distribution source, you gain access to a lot of companies. Its an inherently flawed system and illogical for security practices.
Re:Good time to pick up shares (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in cryptographic security. My stuff doesn't get hacked, but I have the advantage of experience and a lot of experienced coworkers to help.
I don't know which is worse. Having each company implement their security badly and get hacked one by one, or have each company sub it out to a company that ostensibly does know how to do security well, but gets hacked in the end compromising all the companies at the same time.
Then again I don't sell people cloud security services that are really difficult to get right. It would be a fun challenge to work out how to do that. No one is going to pay for that sort of engineering though.
Re:Good time to pick up shares (Score:4, Interesting)
I always ask security candidates if their systems had ever been hacked.
Usually they say no.
My follow up is "How do you know?"
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"No ransom notes. Yet."
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Lol, can you start Monday?
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Even as a one time recipient of one of said ransom notes? :D
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>My follow up is "How do you know?"
There would be a paper published. The biggest threat to high value targets is hairy researchers looking for an easy PhD.
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Our company once fired its internal network engineer and hired an outside firm, which lost most of its contracts and employees during COVID. Then, when they needed to rebuild everything from scratch, they just didn't set up any security, didn't configure the firewall, and didn't apply any security patches from initial install, for 1.5 years. They were too busy and forgot. I was a remote worker and was never even told of a network rebuild.
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>"My stuff doesn't get hacked" YET
If it's still going strong by the time I retire, I'll call it a success.
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Maybe. SolarWinds market cap is still lower than it was when they were hacked in 2019.
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Are you suggesting that Okta won't do something equally inept?
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10% stock loss seems pretty moderate for a security provider that got hacked. The market apparently thinks nobody cares that much.
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Doing damage control by downplaying everything like you are doing here? They had at least one EXISTING CUSTOMER WITH VALID SUPPORT CONTRACT telling them they're being attacked because of some leak from them and DID NOT EVEN ANSWER FOR MORE THAN 2 WEEKS!
And no, it couldn't have been worse and let it slide for two months or years because Cloudflare was already investigating this a day or so be
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Isn't this the second time in a year, exact same attack vector, and again it is Okta customers who found out first?
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The question this raises isn't so much of the immediate, it is more like "is using *anyone* to do the job Okta is doing a good idea?". It doesn't have an easy answer that suits everyone.
My personal view is that anyone "serious" will (at some point in the next year or three) roll off Okta and do it themselves. They'll have the resources to do it properly, and they will benefit from a level of obscurity because they will have their own implementation, and whatever worked at Okta won't work there. They also ha
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Pick one... (Score:3)
Convenient or Secure. Impossible to really have both. Outsourcing convenience is even worse.
Re: Pick one... (Score:2)
Indeed. But some people are in denial about this, even at large it security providers. Basically "there is no silver bullet", IT security version.
To much integration in IT systems? is one system t (Score:2)
To much integration in IT systems an issue?
Is useing one system to be your auth or sso source to much?
Does sets up like that more less give any one who is an admin for system X makes then an admin for all of them with no real way to block them?
Why does that need to be tied to some cloud / 3rd party system that you don't run on your own server?
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3rd breach in 2 years (Score:5, Informative)
2022 breach 1: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03... [techcrunch.com]
2022 breach 2: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12... [techcrunch.com]
In their early 2022 breach, they were chided for lack of timely notification. Given their business model, this is akin to the EQUIFAX, OKTA has utterly and completely failed in their primary business model and has proven to be incapable of fixing their problems.
Passkeys are a better solution (Score:2)
Sooner businesses move to passkeys, the better. It makes Okta and companies like Okta unnecessary.
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Okta supplies a lot of business casey services like federation and stuff. Businesses will keep using this crap.
Outsource internal SSO to your own peril (Score:1)
Re: Outsource internal SSO to your own peril (Score:2)
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Except the cold hard truth is full control is an illusion and your overworked on-prem people are NOT better. Can you dedicate enough people to the Auth space to have full, redundant coverage along with continuous monitoring, mature change processes, and keeping them all trained?
Do one thing, do it well, offer it as a service works wonderfully. The problem comes when someone starts thinking "we could expand into also doing..."
You can make this stuff up. (Score:3)
Okta failing once again epic style at providing a simple feasible 2/3FA-Service has to be the biggest joke in IT security of the last decade.
I mean, how on earth can you fail at this?!?? This already did happen once with Okta a few years ago. How on earth can someone fail at providing basically boils down to a commercial OIDC service? Who on earth runs these companies? And isn't this gross neglect, false advertising and quasi-fraud opening up a gig like Okta to a slew of bazillion-dollar lawsuits?
How stupid can a single company be? I fundamentally don't get it. ...
And shouldn't they be prohibited from even operating at this point?
It looks to me as if the Auth/Auth/Ident service market is run by a bunch of retards. This is so bananas it would be considered implausible as a plot hook for any tech thriller.
Re: You can make this stuff up. (Score:1)
Look at MS: They are a major OS provider and are _still_ too incapable to get patching right, let alone security. The pathetic fucks at Okta are not that much worse after all.
Re: You can make this stuff up. (Score:1)
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Kudos for being dumb enough to not recognize a comment on the state of most of the IT industry.
Re: You can make this stuff up. (Score:1)
Money (Score:1)