Credential theft
Cloudflare breach via stolen Okta credentials (nation-state, Thanksgiving 2023)
Primary Source βIncident Details
Nation-state threat actor (attributed to Midnight Blizzard / Cozy Bear / APT29 in some reporting) used one access token and three service account credentials stolen during the Okta support case management breach (October 2023) to access Cloudflare’s internal systems. Reconnaissance November 14β17 2023; returned November 20β21 and accessed source code management systems. Cloudflare failed to rotate the credentials assuming they were unused. Limited source code and internal documentation on global network architecture exfiltrated. No customer data or Cloudflare services impacted. Zero-trust architecture and hard security keys limited lateral movement. Disclosed publicly 1 February 2024. This was a downstream consequence of the Okta supply chain.
Technical Details
- Initial Attack Vector
- CWE-287: Improper Authentication (stolen access tokens and service account credentials from Okta October 2023 breach reused; Cloudflare failed to rotate them)
- Vendor / Product
- Cloudflare internal systems (Atlassian Confluence wiki, Jira bug tracker, Bitbucket source code)
Timeline
- 2023-11-14 Breach occurred
- 2024-02-01 Publicly disclosed
- 2024-02-01 Customers notified