As the leading independent provider of enterprise identity, Okta integrates with more than 5500+ applications out-of-the-box. Most of these applications are accessible from the Internet and regularly targeted by adversaries. Okta’s security team sees countless intrusion attempts across its customer base, including phishing, password spraying, KnockKnock, and brute-force attacks. They continuously monitor and rapidly respond to these attacks to protect customer tenants and the Okta service. The most commonly targeted application for these attacks is Office 365, a cloud business productivity service developed by Microsoft.
Okta’s customers commonly use a combination of single sign-on (SSO), automated provisioning, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect their Office 365 tenants against the aforementioned attacks. However, Office 365 uses several authentication methods and access protocols, including options that do not support MFA in their authentication flow. It has become increasingly common for attackers to explore these options to compromise business email accounts.
