This is a terrifying and sobering write-up by Retool on so many levels. It's about about a recent spear-phishing via SMS attack on employees, followed by voice phishing attack that deepfaked an employee's voice.

Retool said just one of its employees fell for it, which is of course all it takes. Here's the scary part:

"The voice was familiar with the floor plan of the office, coworkers, and internal processes of the company. Throughout the conversation, the employee grew more and more suspicious, but unfortunately did provide the attacker one additional multi-factor authentication (MFA) code.

The additional OTP token shared over the call was critical, because it allowed the attacker to add their own personal device to the employee’s Okta account, which allowed them to produce their own Okta MFA from that point forward. This enabled them to have an active GSuite session on that device. Google recently released the Google Authenticator synchronization feature that syncs MFA codes to the cloud. As Hacker News noted, this is highly insecure, since if your Google account is compromised, so now are your MFA codes.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option. In our corporate Google account, there is also no way for an administrator to centrally disable Google Authenticator’s sync “feature”. We will get more into this later."

https://retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-mfa/

When MFA isn't actually MFA

Due to a recent Google change, MFA isn't truly MFA.

Retool Blog
@briankrebs sigh. Not that this problem wasn't well understood for years (https://flameeyes.blog/2017/06/24/lastpass-authenticator-cloud-backup-and-you/) and that at other solutions have come up with mitigations (Authy with the backup passphrase.)
LastPass Authenticator, Cloud Backup, and you

I’m still not sure how it is that over the past two years I consider myself a big expert of 2FA, it probably has to do with having wanted to implement this for a very long time for the work I did b…

Flameeyes's Weblog
@flameeyes Point taken. But it's funny that the (2017) post you linked to mentioned LastPass authenticator. Just shows how authentication, like everything else in security, is a moving target.

@briankrebs true. I think the main reason why I was noting LastPass there is because it was the first combined password manager and TOTP generator with cloud backups.

I definitely had to go through a number of blog posts to stop recommending LastPass in the last year!