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
Oh, and if you use Google Authenticator for one-time codes, make sure the cloud icon has a slash thru it. Like this:
@briankrebs I walked into the ocean with my phone in my pocket a month or two after Google started backing up my MFA codes, which really saved my ass, let me tell you. So I'm feeling very ambivalent about this advice, let me tell you.

@AGTMADCAT @briankrebs there are other TOTP apps that can be configured to make less opaque backups. Aegis for Android is an open source TOTP app that has a few options for backups, but I imagine there are others.

https://github.com/beemdevelopment/Aegis

GitHub - beemdevelopment/Aegis: A free, secure and open source app for Android to manage your 2-step verification tokens.

A free, secure and open source app for Android to manage your 2-step verification tokens. - beemdevelopment/Aegis

GitHub