A huge hit on OKTA
March 25th, 2022 - Written By CyberLabs
Many organizations that rely on Okta may have been collateral damage due to the big cyber hit on the company!
Okta’s shares have dropped 9%, and stated that the ‘worst case’ happens to be 366 clients being affected by this attack and their data may have been accessed, viewed and acted upon. Okta has over a 15,000 client base, from big corporations including FedEx to minor scale organizations such as Thanet District Council in Kent. According to sources, the famous cyber-gang Lapsus$ is to be blamed for this attack as well. The threat actors’ group is South American and is behind the recent cyber attacks on some high profile targets. “The cyber-gang is known for extortion, threatening the release of sensitive information, if demands by its victims are not made” according to Ekram Ahmed, of cyber-security company Checkpoint. Their most recent attack being on Microsoft, in a blog post Microsoft also stated that the gang had gained only limited access, after compromising one of the employee’s account. However no customer was affected.
Okta also stated about an attack in January that involved a third-party contractor, “sub-processor” but the matter was investigated and contained. Furthermore, as concerns kept rising they published a series of updated blog posts that included more detail. Cheif security officer David Bradbury, revealed that these cyber criminals had accessed a computer of a customer-support engineer working for the sub-processor, over a 5 day period in mid January. The contractor employing the engineer, Sykes, part of the Sitel Group, said it was “confident there is no longer a security risk”. Thus, extreme security vigilance and precautionary measures are advised by Okta and many targets that got hit by Lapsus$.
