Chris Niggel

Chris Niggel
Regional CSO, Americas, Okta

Chris is the Regional CSO, Americas at Okta, where he is responsible for corporate security compliance, third-party risk, and responding to customer security inquiries. Prior to Okta, Chris spent 6 years leading the adoption of Cloud Technologies at LinkedIn, helping them grow from 350 to over 6,800 employees. He started his career designing, developing, and delivering content management, system administration, and messaging solutions for customers such as Nestle, Cisco, AMD, Telus, and the US Department of Defense. He is also an active member of the Northern California ski community, where he volunteers with the Tahoe Backcountry Ski Patrol performing search & rescue, and teaching ski mountaineering & outdoor survival.

Chris Niggel and Brett Winterford

Monitoring for Abuse of Administrative Privileges

All applications require a highly-privileged administrator role to deploy and maintain that application. The monitoring and oversight (audit) of actions performed by users with these roles is a cornerstone of any well-designed security program. A number of research projects have highlighted ways in which the most privileged administrators in Okta could, if unchecked, abuse their privilege in some way. These research efforts serve to reinforce some long-held security principles: most notably...