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I'm perplexed by most of the response to this (the "brouhaha"). Don't we expect user desktop environments to become compromised from time to time? I mean, obvio
by dboreham 5y ago
I'm perplexed by most of the response to this (the "brouhaha"). Don't we expect user desktop environments to become compromised from time to time? I mean, obviously we try to avoid that happening, but practically speaking it does happen because the user desktop is a very hostile environment and current protection measures are not really 100% effective. So instead we focus on defense in depth meaning that if a user's desktop is compromised, the amount of damage done is limited, by design.
I think the folks hollering that Okta knew a user desktop was compromised and "did nothing about the breach" are over playing that specific event. I'm going to guess that user desktops are compromised frequently and per se this doesn't represent a "breach". If it did, then every large company would suffer a breach every week, at least.
Surely the aspects to focus on are their apparent opsec failures such as passwords in XL spreadsheet, possibly lack of patches on the desktop OS, lack of rate limits on actions by support staff, lack of constraints to affect only users belonging to active support tickets, etc.
- jiveturkey 5y agoI don't think this is the source of the brouhaha, but wasn't this an RDP compromise ... not exactly "user desktop" compromise. Knowing how people do these things, my _guess_ is that Sitel has a fairly locked down desktop. But not locked down enough -- somehow RDP is allowed. The user here doesn't care to work in the Sitel desktop as probably things are highly restricted, so does RDP in from his personal machine. > I'm going to guess that user desktops are compromised frequently doubtful But as I said, I don't think this is what has people up in arms.