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1Password detects "suspicious activity" in its internal Okta account
- readthenotes1 3y agoSo a support system's support system is the culprit?
- rkwasny 3y agoWhenever I see the statement "We found no compromise of user data." it reminds me of a meme that it could mean: "We don't have access logs, so we can't tell if any data was compromised." :-)
- rlt 3y agoGentle reminder: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- iagooar 3y agoTo be fair, evidence of absence is close to impossible in the space of infrastructure and network security.
- ghostpepper 3y agoOTOH every tech CEO knows this and they always say "We have no evidence of compromise" right before they discover evidence of compromise
- genmud 3y agoFull PCAP, process auditing and centralized logs are not only a thing, they have been for decades. It just simply isn't worth the investment for CIO/CTO/CISO types because it isn't sexy. To say it's impossible is just factually inaccurate. I know more than a few places doing 40gbps and 100gbps full packet capture for 30+ days. And relatively speaking, the investment isn't that large (for tens of petabytes it isn't as expensive as you might think).
- thesh4d0w 3y agoWe did this 5+ years ago at a managed hosting company, just for 3 days worth of data. Was still invaluable for figuring out complex events.
- themoonisachees 3y agoAs someone who's entire job is to maintain a gigantic qradar cluster (IBM won't sell us larger licenses), I sure hope 1p have to logs to back their claims because I know that it is possible that they do.
- thih9 3y ago> Despite what the expression may seem to imply, a lack of evidence can be informative. For example, when testing a new drug, if no harmful effects are observed then this suggests that the drug is safe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- frank_nitti 3y agoSeems a very liberal use of the word “safe” unless I’m misunderstanding. It could mean either the drug is 100% safe, or that our methods of observation were insufficient to find the risk. Safe until proven unsafe and the class action lawsuits start, as it goes with many drugs. Doesn’t seem like a particularly strong counter-argument, unless the point is that sometimes we humans like to err on the side of recklessness in the name of progress.
- thih9 3y agoI think you are misunderstanding, the article doesn't just say "safe", the article says "suggests it is safe" (the "suggests" part implies not being 100% certain).
- eviks 3y ago> , if no harmful effects are observed then this suggests that the drug is safe or the harmful effects were missed, and the drug is dangerous
- sprawl_ 3y ago> Original post by 1Password: https://blog.1password.com/okta-incident/ https://blog.1password.com/okta-incident/
- andsens 3y ago> The files the threat actor obtained in the Okta compromise comprised HTTP archive, or HAR, files, which Okta support personnel use to replicate customer browser activity during troubleshooting sessions. Among the sensitive information they store are authentication cookies and session tokens, which malicious actors can use to impersonate valid users. I know that troubleshooting for pwms is hard, but leaving unencrypted files to access accounts on a server that’s not governed by the same threat-model seems very negligent to me.
- AustinDev 3y agoWant to know how I detect suspicious activity in my password manager? I have a plaintext bitcoin private key in my password manager as a note. The name is 'bitcoin wallet'. It contains 0.5 BTC. If my password manager ever get compromised, I can reasonably expect the bitcoins to be move from that wallet address. I then have a BTC node that will send me an SMS if those coins ever move.
- ziddoap 3y agoThat sounds like an expensive notification system.
- paulpauper 3y agoOne should always use caution when using password managers with anything crpyto related.
- KomoD 3y agoI just have a canarytokens credit card stored in it, if anyone tries to auth it I get an alert
- mtmail 3y agoThat looks like a great approach indeed. https://www.canarytokens.org/generate https://www.canarytokens.org/generate
- noknownsender 3y agoIsn't that potentially a $15k detection method?
- altairprime 3y agoMore like $8k net after taxes, anyways.
- drexlspivey 3y agoDoesn't the US have a tax free allowance for capital gains? In the UK for example you get a 15k allowance annualy
- frereubu 3y agoThis is an incident report from 1Password that I found more readable (PDF): https://blog.1password.com/files/okta-incident/okta-incident-report.pdf https://blog.1password.com/files/okta-incident/okta-incident...
- politelemon 3y agoYes that's much better, the original article felt mixed up. So the culprit seems to have been the session information in the har. It made me wonder a few questions. What were they troubleshooting with Okta that required sending a har over, of their own interaction with Okta. And why are the session lengths so long, wouldn't Okta dogfood and use their own JWTs with limited lifetime?
- dang 3y agoOk, we changed to that from https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/1password-detects-suspicious-activity-in-its-internal-okta-account/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/1password-detects-s... above. Thanks!
- Uptrenda 3y agoHonestly, it seems to me like we are heading back to a world where everything is self-hosted again. You can't keep a giant central target secure.
- samcat116 3y agoI actually think if a bunch of companies started hosting their own SSO, we'd hear of a lot more hacks. I'm not sure orgs would put in enough resources to do things properly other than "hey we got keycloak working"
- steve1977 3y agoMaybe SSO as such is not the greatest idea?
- flandish 3y agoYeah but self hosted means someone out of laziness will expose a port so they dont have to be home to sync or configure wireguard, etc… and/or since all ips are scanned anyway… Complacency will result in more leaks and less knowledge of them maybe? I reckon “passwords on a notepad in pen and ink” is safer plus passkeys like yubi. If someone breaks into your home you got other concerns..
- rurp 3y agoCompanies don't force their cloud hosting solutions because it's good for users, they do it because they can make more money. Unfortunately I think things will have to get a lot worse before companies have to reverse course on this.
- bananapub 3y agorandom IT departments won't do a better job securing IDP than google or microsoft or whatever, self-hosting that stuff will just lead to more, mostly smaller breaches. simultaneously, Okta seems rather bad at their job of not getting hacked and having proper fucking audit logs
- api 3y agoSo it's finally happened at least a tiny bit: one of these corporations to which we have decided to dedicate all authority has had a breach. Someday it will be much, much worse. Someday someone will manage to breach and take control of a bigger one in a bigger way, and will instantly gain root on a large subset of the entire computing ecosystem. There's a trend of even delegating things like ssh to systems under OIDC control, so I'm not using root metaphorically. But hey, OIDC is convenient and that's all that matters in computing.
- hnav 3y agoLastPass had a breach recently where entire vaults where stolen encrypted. Older entries were stored using worse (key derived using KDF with too few iterations) encryption than more recent ones.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoWhat’s your alternative?
- api 3y agoA more portable standardized version of the Apple distributed Secure Enclave sort of thing as 2FA with passwords as the first factor would be great. You could also add something like a Yubikey as an emergency unlock token. It’d be based on keys you control so there’s no way someone could hack some master database or key authority and own the entire universe. That’s a distinct possibility today. Plausible scenario: high sophisticated nation state sponsored break at Google with cooperation from inside, used to launch a sudden mass malware infection attack against hundreds of millions of systems.
- jbverschoor 3y ago“found no compromise of user data or other sensitive systems, either employee-facing or user-facing” Does not mean it didn’t happen
- kasdi 3y agoNo, it does not. But one can’t assert something one doesn’t know. Therefore this assertion is as good as they can do.
- activescott 3y agoSeems like 1P took the right steps and is being transparent about the incident. It wasn't even an on their systems - but one of their vendors support systems. A lower quality organization would just conveniently not disclose the incident at all - justifying it by saying something along the lines of nothing was breached, it wasn't even our system. I think we should applaud 1P's transparency here. Or am I missing something?
- greyface- 3y ago> am I missing something? This comes immediately after 1P's forced transition away from local app with local storage to Web app with cloud storage, and assurances that their security stance and practices would make a breach unlikely. If they had stuck with the old model, a breach would have no chance of impacting users, but now, we're left scratching our heads and speculating about the true extent of the damage.
- fnordprefect 3y agoI raised exactly this possibility with them when they announced their new model. Their support would not engage with this even as a possibility. Just assertions that everything would be completely secure. Getting access to this data is the holy grail for attackers - it is preposterous not to have a local-only or "saved on iCloud only" model. Clearly the only reason they removed this ability was the juicy, juicy subscription revenue, which requires them to hold the data. They may have avoided a breach this time but have they previously been breached? Will they be breached in future? The possibility of each is non-zero. Needless to say, I'm still using the older version and am planning how to transition once it stops working after an OS update.
- joshspankit 3y ago> juicy, juicy subscription revenue The irony is that as a user since at least version 3, I would have easily kept paying a yearly subscription fee just for the same local+sync they had before centralizing. It’s clear that most tech businesses need stable recurring revenue in order to keep doing their best work. They could have probably done an Amanda Palmer-style patreon (donations fund the ability to make all work public) for individuals/families and a straightforward high-cost enterprise subscription and been just as big if not bigger.
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoDon't outsource something as critical as SSO to internal systems. The end. Also, don't use 1Password or LastPass. KeePassXC, PasswordSafe, Dashlane, or properly-configured Bitwarden.
- knodi 3y agoWhat action should a user of 1Password take?
- femboy 3y agoThe owner of this website (www.bleepingcomputer.com) has banned your IP address. Anyone else?
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoNot me. Are you on a VPN?
- safeimp 3y agoThis has specifics: https://blog.1password.com/okta-incident/ https://blog.1password.com/okta-incident/
- yellow_postit 3y agoA bit light on details but seems "Requested a report of administrative users" was the main outcome disclosed which I assume means further phishing and attack vectors on 1Password admins. Any other takes?
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoI’m confused why 1Password publicly reported this if there was no damage.
- beart 3y agoI'm encouraged by this, and the steps they took to implement additional precautions for the future. I would guess that was the goal of this release.
- aaomidi 3y agoThis is effectively best security practices IMHO.
- batmansmk 3y agoBingo.
- Auguste 3y agoI appreciate their transparency. I'm not a 1Password customer, but this earned some respect from me.
- politelemon 3y agoIt's almost a standard practice now, most companies do this.
- bananapub 3y agowhat's confusing? 1. because people want to know if their for-money proprietary password storage company got hacked 1. because if in the future they actually get owned, "oh yeah, it sorta happened another time also but we didn't say anything" is a terrible look
- montroser 3y agoIt might possibly be a bad idea for everyone to consolidate all of the credentials and all of the auth flow mechanics for all of the things to a small handful of companies.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> It might possibly be a bad idea for everyone to consolidate all of the credentials and all of the auth flow mechanics for all of the things to a small handful of companies. People have long lost the difference in meaning between "security" and "convenience". They now believe the two are interchangeable.
- thephyber 3y agoI’ve never met anyone who has made this conflation. Okta and 1Pass are incredibly well designed and the companies do all of the right things when it comes to security and audit processes.
- lolinder 3y agoIn the real world they often are—complicated-but-secure processes usually lead to work arounds that are worse than if you had just planned for convenience from the beginning. The classic example of this is the sticky note with the password on it. Securing a large organization populated by regular human beings is extremely difficult, and is an exercise in balancing theoretical security with convenience.
- zzyzxd 3y agoI don't know how many people believe the two words are interchangeable (vs balancing factors), but one of your worst security nightmares could be when your employees fight against your security team. Making things inconvenience is one way to have it.
- scottlamb 3y ago> People have long lost the difference in meaning between "security" and "convenience". They now believe the two are interchangeable. Not sure they're wrong. There are so many IT departments and websites that force dumb practices which are detrimental to both: frequent password changes, required low-entropy recovery question options, etc. And then on the other side, some really convenient flows with reasonable security, e.g. streaming apps that show you a short temporary credential you can copy from your Roku's screen to your signed-in computer/phone rather than requiring you downgrade your permanent password to something easier to enter on the Roku keyboard. So while fundamentally you're right that "security" and "convenience" are in tension, in practice I think the bigger factor is competence and care of the dev and admin teams.
- pphysch 3y agoIf a SaaS is approximately as unreliable and insecure as self-managed software, the only reason to still choose it would be for liability reasons. You get to legally blame someone else if things go wrong. I'm curious whether companies have faced this hard reality and decided that buying liability insurance + doing things inhouse is more economical & better for business.
- lolinder 3y agoI'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that hiring a SaaS provider shields you from any liability that you would otherwise be subject to. If 1Password were to suffer a massive data breach as a result of this, historical precedent says that there'd be no liability anyway, but if there were liability I can't see them getting out of it by blaming Okta.
- windowsworkstoo 3y agoYah, this is why third party risk management is a thing. When I ran sec training, I always hammered home the point that a third party security issue is your issue. Now, sure, technically there may be circumstances when you can technically/legally shift liability. But your customers don't care - they have the relationship with you. So the third parties problems, are your problems.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago> only reason to still choose it would be for liability reasons That’s not a reason. Haven’t you read any terms of service and user agreements? The vendor never accepts responsibility.
- pphysch 3y agoI'm more referring to SLAs and the like.
- jonhohle 3y agoA base level of competency is expected as well. An SMB with a small staff that sells something non-tech still needs POS, payroll, and other systems and the ability to give employees access to those systems. “Outsourcing security” makes sense for businesses with zero IT staff. For large companies, however, it seems like a liability, but I would hope an IdP would still be more competent, on average, then internal IT staff (obviously there are tech companies that have needed to deal with this for a long time with success). If a large business’s competency is not tech, there is some likelihood they can’t evaluate the robustness of their IT infrastructure.
- Fischgericht 3y agoSo, a company that is supposed to protect your most valued secrets and therefore should have paranoid security is using an external support system without any 2FA, and with fully unprotected session tokens/cookies, which in addition appear to have an insane timeout (how else could someone re-use the HAR files?). Wow. In general I would regard anyone using a password manager that uses a cloud service and/or phones home to be unreasonable. But even if you believe that this is a good idea, at this point everyone should drop 1Password as they clearly do not have the competence to run such a service.
- whoisjuan 3y agoIt was a minor incident, but it does remind me that centralized password managers seem to have an awful amount of concentrated risk. Or is something like 1Password truly secure at its core, even if an attacker penetrates some layers of access?
- activescott 3y agoYes, 1Password's end-to-end encryption model (explained at https://support.1password.com/1password-security/ https://support.1password.com/1password-security/) should be secure to this even if an attacker penetrates some layers of access. The model of other password managers may or not hold up though. With that said, there is a lot of rebuttals to this that begin with "but, that assumes..." that I'm sure some of our fellow HN peeps will point out here :)
- davinci123 3y agoI bet there are 100 other Okta customers who saw something similar and are on reporting on it - props should be given to 1Password to publicly talk about this. All this shows how interconnected the cloud world is and there is nothing called absolute security. You want absolute security -> crawl back into the on-prem world.
- ghostpepper 3y agoAnyone else think it's odd that they scanned the laptop in question with Malwarebytes instead of, you know, a full forensic examination?
- mango7283 3y agoIt's the go to for a lot of security teams (a fact i'm sure Malwarebytes wishes leveraged into more sales for their actual enterprise product) for routine stuff (random adware etc - no one can afford to run full forensics on all those all the time). It's odd that they wrote that right out there on an incident report publicly shared and related to such a high profile potential breach though, for something like this it really has to be more of a 1st step triage than a definitive nope nothing wierd here...