Based in San Francisco On Tuesday, Okta Inc, a widely used access management business that competes with PingID and Duo for online authentication services, announced that it was investigating a data breach.
The breadth of the breach is unknown, but a compromise at Okta could have enormous ramifications because the company manages access to thousands of other organizations’ networks and apps.
Okta is denying that it has been hacked, despite a group of hackers claiming to have gained access to internal data.
Okta chief security officer David Bradbury said in a statement Tuesday that the business, which specializes in assisting other organizations in managing employee access to internal resources, is still fully operating and that customers do not need to take any action.
According to Bradbury, the company discovered an unsuccessful attempt to hack into the account of a third-party customer support engineer in January.
“An attacker had access to a support engineer’s laptop” for five days in January, according to a study from an outside forensics firm. “We take our obligation to protect and secure the information of our clients very seriously,” Bradbury added. “We are committed to openness and will provide additional updates as they become available.”
According to Reuters, the hacker group Lapsus$ uploaded screenshots of the suspected intrusion. According to security specialists who contacted Reuters, the screenshots looked to be genuine.
Okta stated it is still looking into the matter.
Matthew Prince, the CEO, and co-founder of cloud platform Cloudflare announced on Twitter that employees’ Okta passwords were being reset as a precaution.
Prince wrote, “Okta is one layer of security.” “Because they may have a problem, we’re looking at other options for that layer.”