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EnterpriseIdentity / SaaS·October 19, 2023Draft

Okta: Okta support-portal HAR file leak exposes 134 customer environments

A threat actor used a service-account credential stored in a personal Google account to access Okta's customer-support case-management system and download HAR files containing session tokens for 134 customer organisations.

Velocity Governance perspective· Sentinel-10 overlap: 2 of 3

2 of the 3 practices that failed in this incident are part of the Sentinel-10 — the engineering protocols Concordance flags as most degraded under AI-accelerated development.

This incident pre-dates today's AI-velocity surge. The thesis is that the same practices that failed here will fail faster under AI velocity if not actively governed. Read the Velocity Governance thesis →

Impact

134
Affected
Triggered breach disclosures by 1Password, BeyondTrust, Cloudflare, others
Regulatory action

Multiple Okta customers including 1Password, BeyondTrust, and Cloudflare publicly disclosed downstream incidents. Okta stock dropped ~11% on disclosure.

Root cause (from published RCA)

A service account used to access the Okta customer-support system was stored in an employee's personal Google profile. The personal Google account was compromised, exposing the service-account credential. The service account had access to the customer-support case-management system where customers had uploaded HAR files containing valid session tokens.

Concordance protocols that map to this root cause

Click any protocol to see every other indexed incident where it failed.

Protocol 3.9Secrets Management· DevelopmentSENTINELsee all incidents →
Secrets management: a production-impacting service-account credential was stored in personal cloud storage rather than a managed secrets vault.
Protocol 3.5Approval Rigor· Developmentsee all incidents →
Approval rigor on service-account scope: account had broader read access to the support system than its function required.
Protocol 3.6Code Ownership· DevelopmentSENTINELsee all incidents →
Code ownership / responsibility for the service account was not clearly assigned, allowing personal-device storage to persist.

Primary sources

Unauthorized Access to Okta's Support Case Management System: Root Cause and Remediation
Okta · November 3, 2023
Tracking Unauthorized Access to Okta's Support System
Okta · October 20, 2023

Related incidents

Other incidents that failed at least one of the same protocols.

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OpenSSL ProjectApr 2014
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#credential-leak#over-privileged-account#session-token#support-system
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Concordance Incident Index entry · CC BY 4.0 · Methodology · Errata: hello@concordancelabs.com