This past week, I had the pleasure of volunteering my time to help with an #OktaforGood initiative: Micro-mentoring at the Accelerate Good Global conference. Micro-mentoring in this case involved discussions with nonprofit leaders that had questions about technology, or running their business. The conversations are limited to 20 minutes each, and…

Authentication is undoubtedly one of the most crucial aspects of cybersecurity today, but our understanding of how to verify users and their actions has been largely unchanged for decades. It always works the same: the user provides something they know (password), have (ID), or are (fingerprint) and if this input matches what the system knows…

Selections from the top news items this week in the world of identity and application security. Cloud computing is eating the world: Should we be worried? Warning: Video may autoplay From ZDNet: The days of securing data physically on mainframes is over. New research from Cisco predicts that by 2021, 628 'hyperscale' data centers will exist,…

Several weeks ago a new critical vulnerability was discovered that affects many SAML implementations. This vulnerability was first reported by Kelby Ludwig of Duo Security and is particularly interesting to us (as a user management company) as it can be used to bypass authentication in a sinisterly simplistic way. In this post, we’ll take an in…

Yesterday at Okta we celebrated International Women’s Day, honoring the women who have brought us to where we are now and the women who continue to pave the way. Led by our Women@Okta team, we committed to #PressforProgress in our own unique ways, and we raised $5265 for Okta for Good’s fund for women, benefitting Global Fund for Women (an Okta…

For many women — myself included — International Women's Day is a day of mixed feelings. It’s a day to celebrate the strides women have made in the past and present, encourage each other to keep fighting the good fight, and inspire future generations of young women and girls. But at the same time, we face the fact that true gender equality is…

As a growing company, you have part-time employees, seasonal interns, partners, and contractors who all require access to your corporate apps and data. With these users coming and going at different times, and potentially spread across different departments and geographies, it’s easy to lose track of permissions and whose access must be revoked…

This post was originally shared on the OpsRamp blog. -- A recent study by search firm Korn Ferry found that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have an average tenure of 4.3 years. Most CIOs don't last for five years at an organization and have the second shortest job tenure for C-suite members! It's little wonder, then, there's an army of experts…

Today security researchers announced they found a vulnerability in some SAML implementations that threat actors could use to bypass primary authentication, potentially elevating permissions or impersonating privileged accounts. We were made aware of the vulnerability before the public disclosure and immediately patched it. Okta is not vulnerable,…