== Information on mitigating security controls in place that could have limited the severity of the incident ==

The screenshots show that LAPSUS$ had access via the account of the outsourced Costa Rican based Tier 2 TSE worker to view details of and reset the password of a UK-based site reliability engineer of a well known Internet global infrastructure company. This level of access in itself doesn't sound hugely problematic on its own if it weren't for job applications for Okta Tier 2 TSE workers indicating server/network administration responsibilities. There is some publicly published information that provides more context on what access a Tier 2 TSE worker may have to customer data:

- Okta's security whitepaper [1] states that multi-factor authentication is needed for administrative access to AWS instances (host operating systems) so this could have possibly prevented LAPSUS$ from using their access to do anything more sinister than perhaps causing customer organisation-wide outages by disabling/resetting all their user accounts. The response for control AC-17(06) at [3] indicates that remote access requires valid multi-factor authentication to occur so if LAPSUS$ could gain remote access, perhaps they had already gained the ability to generate valid multi-factor authentication tokens, or otherwise bypass multi-factor authentication for remote access.

- The response for controls IA-02(09), AC-06(07), PS-04(01) and SA-12 at [3] indicates that Okta employee access to customer data is deemed privileged access and that fewer than 30 Okta employees have this level of privileged access to this customer data. I doubt this is true, unless the SP 800-53r4 responses at [3] are only referring to the US government tenancies that are hosted separately from tenancies of global companies.

- The response for controls SI-04(12), SI-04(19) and SI-04(20) at [3] indicates that changes made to a customer tenancy (for example resetting passwords for customer users as shown in the LAPSUS$ screenshots) should have triggered events being sent to both Okta's Splunk SIEM system and also to a customer SIEM system if they have set one up. Theoretically this should quickly raise a red flag to the customer if LAPSUS$ were to use this access to bulk deny the customer access to their ICT systems. It is however not clear that privileged access to the host operating system for the AWS instance would cause an event to be sent to the customer's SIEM system.

== Level of segregation of customer tenancies and whether LAPSUS$ may have been using Okta access to attack customers ==

It's fairly straightforward to enumerate the Okta hosting arrangements from DNS records as listed below. The sample targeted company in the screenshots has their Okta tenancy hosted within AWS region us-west-2 (Okta OK7) and other screenshots showed that the compromised account had recently accessed privileged access tools for OK3, OK8 and OK12. Thus it would appear that a Costa Rican-based Tier 2 TSE worker would have access to customer information within perhaps any of the clusters (not geographically restricted).

ok-crtr-tls1-nlb-36253386bec48ce6.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com - response when a tenancy is invalid/doesn't exist
ok2-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com - companies (global)
ok3-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com - companies (global)
ok4-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com - companies (global)
ok5-crtr-tls12-fips-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com - US government agencies
ok6-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com - companies (global)
ok7-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com - companies (global)
ok8-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com - Australian government agencies and some other Australian companies/associations
ok9-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com - unknown / no customers found
ok10-crtr-tls12-fips-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com - US government agencies
ok11-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-east-2.amazonaws.com - unknown / no customers found
ok12-crtr-tls12-nlb-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.elb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com - unknown / no customers found

To attempt to answer a question in another comment, whether LAPSUS$ could have been compromising other companies via Okta:

microsoft.okta.com - likely customer - ok3-crtr-tls12-nlb-dfef298ffc8f82ca.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
nvidia.okta.com - likely customer - ok2-crtr-tls12-nlb-acd62f33a2a6a463.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
vodafone.okta.com - confirmed customer [4] - ok4-crtr-tls12-nlb-29367a8e4bb80716.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
samsung.okta.com [5] - possibly not a customer - ok-crtr-tls1-nlb-36253386bec48ce6.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
ubisoft.okta.com - possbily not a customer - ok-crtr-tls1-nlb-36253386bec48ce6.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
lg.okta.com [5] - possibly not a customer - ok-crtr-tls1-nlb-36253386bec48ce6.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

... so, probably not?

[1] https://www.okta.com/resources/whitepaper/okta-security-tech...

[2] https://trust.okta.com/security/

[3] https://www.okta.com/resources/whitepaper/using-okta-to-prot...

[4] https://miniorange.com/atlassian/atlassian-single-sign-on-ss...

[5] Note: also tried similar names known to be used by company divisions.