On Monday evening, the Lapsus$ digital extortion gang published a series of increasingly shocking posts in its Telegram channel. First, the group dumped what it claims is extensive source code from Microsoft's Bing search engine, Bing Maps, and Cortana virtual assistant software. A potential breach of an organization as big and security-conscious as Microsoft would be significant in itself, but the group followed the post with something even more alarming: screenshots apparently taken on January 21 that seem to show Lapsus$ in control of an Okta administrative or “super user” account.

Lapsus$ hacker group claim to have breached #Microsoft & authentication company #Okta and released 37 GB of data, including source code for Bing Search, #Bing Maps and #Cortana, Microsoft's virtual assistant.https://t.co/n9rxu6lXeV#infosec #databreach #hacking #cybersecurity

— The Hacker News (@TheHackersNews) March 22, 2022

Okta has provided further details of the cybersecurity incident. In an updated statement, the technology vendor said "Okta service has not been breached and remains fully operational. There are no corrective actions that need to be taken by our customers." Okta also said that during the January incident, the impacted customer support engineer's account was quickly suspended while a third-party cyberforensics firm investigated the issue. "Following the completion of the service provider's investigation, we received a report from the forensics firm this week," Okta said. "The report highlighted that there was a five-day window of time between January 16-21, 2022, where an attacker had access to a support engineer's laptop."

Lapsus$ respond to Okta's statement:

Lapsus$ respond to Okta's statement. pic.twitter.com/TYTz43FH23

— Brett Callow (@BrettCallow) March 22, 2022