The US-based software firm Okta has discovered malicious activity using a stolen credential to access Okta’s support case management system. An attacker was able to view sensitive files uploaded by Okta customers.
According to the company’s public statement, the Auth0/CIC case management system and the Okta service in production are unaffected by the hack. The firm has contacted each consumer who this issue has impacted.
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Users’ Sensitive Information Exposed
The support case management system compromised in this attack contained HTTP Archive (HAR) files, which facilitates troubleshooting by replicating browser activity.
Cookies and session tokens, among other sensitive data, can be found in HAR files and used by malicious actors to pose as legitimate users.
To safeguard their customers, Okta has investigated with the help of the affected customers and taken steps, such as revoking embedded session tokens.
The two customers who acknowledged they were the target of the most recent attack on Okta’s support system are BeyondTrust and Cloudflare.
“Within 30 minutes of the administrator uploading the file to Okta’s support portal an attacker used the session cookie from this support ticket, attempting to perform actions in the BeyondTrust Okta environment”, BeyondTrust reports.
According to BeyondTrust, on October 2nd, it discovered an identity-centric attack on an internal Okta administrator account and swiftly stopped the attack using its identity security technologies, with no harm or exposure to the company’s infrastructure or its clients.
On October 18, 2023, Cloudflare discovered attacks on their system; they asserted that no customer data or services were compromised.
“The threat actor was able to hijack a session token from a support ticket that was created by a Cloudflare employee. Using the token extracted from Okta, the threat actor accessed Cloudflare systems on October 18,” Cloudflare reports.
“Our Security Incident Response Team’s (SIRT) real-time detection and prompt response enabled containment and minimized the impact on Cloudflare systems and data.”
Recommendation
Okta advises sanitizing all login information, cookies, and session tokens before sharing a HAR file. In General, enabling Hardware MFA for all user accounts is advised.
As part of the investigation, Okta provided indicators of compromise that included IP addresses and User-Agent info related to the attackers. This helps to assist customers who wish to perform their threat-hunting activity.
“We recommend referring to our previously published advice on how to search System Log for any given suspicious session, user, or IP. Please note that the majority of the indicators are commercial VPN nodes according to our enrichment information”, the company said.
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