Okta says 366 company prospects, or about 2.5% of its buyer base, have been impacted by a safety breach that allowed hackers to entry the corporate’s inner community.
The authentication big admitted the compromise after the Lapsus$ hacking and extortion group posted screenshots of Okta’s apps and programs on Monday, some two months after the hackers first gained entry to its community.
The breach was initially blamed on an unnamed subprocessor that gives buyer help providers to Okta. In an up to date assertion on Wednesday, Okta’s chief safety officer David Bradbury confirmed the subprocessor is an organization referred to as Sykes, which final yr was acquired by Miami-based contact heart big Sitel.
Buyer help firms like Sykes and Sitel typically have extensive entry to the organizations that they help for facilitating buyer requests. Malicious hackers have beforehand focused buyer help firms, which regularly have weaker cybersecurity defenses than among the highly-secured firms that they help. Microsoft and Roblox have each skilled related focused compromises of buyer help brokers’ accounts that led to entry of their inner programs.
In Okta’s case, the Lapsus$ hackers have been in Sitel’s community for 5 days over January 16-21, 2022 till the hackers have been detected and booted from its community, in accordance with Bradbury.
Okta confronted appreciable criticism from the broader safety business for its dealing with of the compromise and the months-long delay in notifying prospects, which came upon on the similar time when information broke on social media. Based on Bradbury, Sitel engaged an unnamed forensics agency to analyze, which concluded on March 10. Solely per week later was the report turned over to Okta on March 17.
Bradbury mentioned he’s “drastically dissatisfied by the lengthy time frame that transpired between our notification to Sitel and the issuance of the entire investigation report,” and admitted that Okta “ought to have moved extra swiftly” to grasp the report’s implications.
However an e-mail from a Sitel consultant disputed how Okta characterised the report, saying that the safety breach “didn’t influence legacy Sitel Group programs or networks; solely legacy Sykes’ community was affected.” (The Sitel consultant declared their e-mail “off the document,” which requires each events to comply with the phrases upfront. We’re printing the responses since we got no alternative to say no.) The e-mail added: “Now we have not discovered proof of a safety breach of consumer’s programs or networks on legacy Sykes or Sitel Group facet.” The e-mail additionally mentioned that the Sitel has no proof of a knowledge breach, however the firm declined to say if it has the means, reminiscent of logs, to find out what, if any, knowledge was accessed or exfiltrated by the attackers. Sitel wouldn’t identify the forensics agency that investigated the breach.
An earlier assertion attributed to Sitel spokesperson Rebecca Sanders mentioned: “Because of the investigation, together with our ongoing evaluation of exterior threats, we’re assured there is no such thing as a longer a safety danger. We’re unable to touch upon our relationship with any particular manufacturers or the character of the providers we offer for our purchasers.”
Okta has not but responded to TechCrunch’s questions relating to the breach.