Cloudflare, a prominent Internet security and DDoS protection company, recently fell victim to a cyberattack linked to the widespread Okta supply-chain campaign last fall. The breach, affecting Cloudflare's Atlassian Bitbucket, Confluence, and Jira platforms, commenced on Thanksgiving Day.
Cloudflare, in collaboration with industry and government partners, determined that a nation-state attacker aimed to gain persistent and widespread access to its global network. Working with CrowdStrike, the company found that cyber attackers initially accessed the internal wiki (Confluence) and bug database (Jira). They later established persistence on the Atlassian server and proceeded to explore potential points of entry. The assailants successfully breached Cloudflare's source code management system (Bitbucket) and an AWS instance.
The analysis revealed the attackers sought information about the configuration and management of Cloudflare's global network. They accessed various Jira tickets related to vulnerability management, secret rotation, MFA bypass, network access, and the company's response to the Okta incident. Fortunately, due to network segmentation and a zero-trust authentication approach limiting lateral movement, the attackers were largely prevented from accessing critical systems.
Despite minimal access, Cloudflare took comprehensive measures, rotating over 5,000 production credentials, segmenting test and staging systems, and conducting forensic triages on nearly 5,000 systems. The company also reimaged and rebooted every machine in its global network and all Atlassian products.
Experts emphasise the severity of supply chain attacks, highlighting the risk of non-human access being exploited by attackers to gain high-privilege access to internal systems. This breach underscores the importance of monitoring both cloud-based and on-premises solutions.
Notably, Cloudflare identified the compromise's connection to a prior Okta breach in October. Okta, an identity and access management services provider, disclosed a compromise in its customer support case management system, exposing sensitive customer data. The attackers leveraged access tokens and service account credentials obtained during the Okta compromise. All threat actor access was terminated on November 24, according to CrowdStrike.
In response, Cloudflare conducted a thorough security remediation, emphasising the need for credential rotation after a security incident. Okta confirmed its prior notification to customers about the October security incident, urging them to rotate credentials and providing indicators of compromise.
This incident draws attention to the ongoing challenges posed by sophisticated cyber threats, making it clear that the importance of continuous vigilance and proactive security measures is substantial. The collaboration between companies and security experts remains crucial in mitigating the impact of such attacks.
As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, it is imperative for organisations to stay informed, implement robust security practices, and prioritise swift responses to potential breaches.
