Passwords. Most of us have a love-hate relationship with them. Security best practices and common sense tells us to pick unique, hard-to-guess passwords for every account, which makes management of them a pain, or leads to bad password habits like reusing them. Then there’s the inherent security of passwords, or rather, the insecurity of them. As…

At Okta, we are highly invested in the latest ideas and practices around authentication and security—and that requires some myth busting. This blog is the second in a series of posts meant to tackle common misunderstandings and myths around single sign-on (SSO). See below for our full list of the myths we've seen (and busted!) around SSO. Single…

When it comes to data security, there’s no such thing as too big to fail. Chances are, if you’ve switched on the news recently you’ve heard of at least one high-profile data breach. Perhaps of even greater concern is that a few large organisations have fallen victim to multiple data breaches in the past few years. This is a surefire sign that…

Okta integrates everything! That includes Hybrid IT scenarios with your legacy apps, your custom apps, your proprietary apps, as well as your infrastructure. Today, we’re releasing an eBook covering 18 standard-based integration patterns Okta supports to connect identities to your legacy apps and infrastructure. Interested? For more details to…

Password managers, such as Okta Browser Plugin can defend against phishing attacks. However, to prevent the compromise of passwords, password managers need to be hardened against attacks that confuse them into misidentifying websites. To help achieve this, the Okta Research and Exploitation team (REX) has created a tool, hack_url_re, to…

Okta provides an LDAP interface in the cloud (great for hybrid IT and hybrid cloud deployments). The interface does not require an agent on-premises and supports Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) over LDAP—even though the LDAP protocol doesn't natively support MFA. In this blog post, I’ll explain why and how Okta does it. Okta LDAP interface:…

The most critical security threats facing enterprises today are attacks targeted at user credentials. The average number of credential theft incidents has tripled over the past two years, and today, 81% of all hacking-related breaches leverage either stolen and/or weak passwords. Using passwords alone as a means of defence for organisations simply…

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an internet protocol that enterprise programs such as email, CRM, and HR software use to authenticate access and find information from a server. It is open, vendor-neutral, well supported, and flexible enough for storing information on internal and external users alike. Because of its scalability…

Usernames and passwords have long been the standard when it comes to authentication, but it’s become very clear that this approach to security is fundamentally broken. The good news? Modern authentication technologies are making it possible to secure access in new ways and finally leave passwords behind. MFA leads the way The secret to doing away…

The Forrester Zero Trust model, which has been around since 2009, argues that organisations should regard all network traffic as untrusted, regardless of where it’s coming from. The idea of a trusted internal perimeter leaves the organisation at risk if that perimeter is compromised or an insider turns malicious. Of course, the situation has…