Defensive Cyber Operations

Summary Okta has observed attacks in which a threat actor used social engineering to attain a highly privileged role in an Okta customer Organization (tenant). When successful, the threat actor demonstrated novel methods of lateral movement and defense evasion. These methods are preventable and present several detection opportunities for defenders. In recent weeks, multiple US-based Okta customers have reported a consistent pattern of social engineering attacks against their IT service desk...

Robust protection comes from layers, and many of you are already familiar with the Swiss Cheese Model. Simply stated, even when you're confident in your primary controls, that confidence only grows with each additional layer added. Because who wants to have a defense that’s built around a single slice of sad cheese, wrapped in a pitiful film of plastic? No thanks, we’ll take that sturdy block of Swiss each and every time.  Of course, given how thin most security teams are spread, robust...

Okta Security endorses phishing resistant authentication at every opportunity. We’ve long argued enrolling users in Okta FastPass, FIDO2 WebAuthn authenticators or Smart Cards, and enforcing phishing resistant authentication flows will: Protect users against real-time phishing proxies and other forms of session hijacking. Solve for far more attacks than simply adding Number Challenge to Push notifications to defeat MFA Fatigue. Offer detection opportunities via System Log and the automation...