• by Ray Schultz , March 25, 2022

British police have arrested seven people who allegedly were involved in hacks against Okta Inc. and Microsoft Corp.  

Police say that the people who were arrested are between the ages of 16 and 21. They have been released, but remain under investigation.

Reports say that the hacks were committed by the Lapsus$ extortion gang, which has also hacked Nvidia and Samsung over the past month, CRN reports.   

Okta, an authentication firm, reported this week that it detected an attempt to compromise the account of a customer-support engineer working for a third-party provider.

A probe found a five-day window between January 16 and January 21, 2022, where an attacker had access to a support engineer’s laptop. The company suspended the person’s account, and has alerted the third-party service provider.

The service has not been breached, and no corrective actions need to be taken by customers, Chief Security Officer David Bradbury wrote in a Tuesday blog post. 

Lapsus$ reportedly is masterminded by a teenager who resides in Oxford, England. The group appears to be to be “less financially motivated than traditional ransomware gangs, with Lapsus$ rarely encrypting victim networks and often releasing data before demanding payment,” CRN reports.  

This week, Lapsus$ also said it had hacked internal source code repositories for Microsoft Azure DevOps.  

In a separate development this week, marketing tech firm HubSpot has alerted clients to possible data exposure following a cyber attack that apparently targeted cryptocurrency industry customers.