IMPLEMENTING COMPREHENSIVE IDENTITY CONTINUITY PLANS TO COUNTERACT CYBER THREATS

Аннотация

INTRODUCTION identification become critically important for In the context of the rapid growth of digitalization protecting business processes and maintaining and the increasing number of cyber threats, customer trust. ensuring data security becomes a key factor in the successful operation of companies. One of the most The relevance of this topic is driven by the need to vulnerable areas in information security is the improve the reliability of identification systems, process of user authentication and identification. which directly affects companies' resilience to Modern cyberattacks are often aimed at cyberattacks or a misconfiguration leading to compromising credentials, which can lead to the failure of the authentication provider. leakage of confidential information and disruption Authentication errors, whether caused by of normal system operations. To improve technical failures or malicious actions, can authentication security and reduce friction with significantly reduce the efficiency of business applications many organizations have chosen to processes, ultimately leading to financial losses leverage cloud based authentication providers. and a decline in the company's reputation. As a This has now become a single point of failure. In result, many organizations are seeking to architect this regard, the development and implementation their most critical systems to minimize the risks of comprehensive plans for ensuring continuous associated with authentication failure through the https://www.theamericanjournals.com/index.php/tajet 59 THE USA JOURNALS THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (ISSN – 2689-0984) VOLUME 06 ISSUE12 implementation of backup authentication and in the field of authentication and data security. multi-factor authentication (MFA) providers, and For example, on November 15, 2022, at 10:37 AM continuous security system monitoring. Pacific Time, Okta released an integration update The objective of this study is to analyze and with Microsoft Office 365 to remove outdated links evaluate methods for implementing to Microsoft Dynamics. At 11:09 AM the same day, comprehensive identification continuity plans to reports of authentication failures via SSO in counter cyber threats, failure of primary identity Microsoft Office 365 began to surface. Upon providers, as well as to identify key factors analyzing the situation, it was determined that the influencing the effectiveness of these plans. issue affected all clients using Office 365, and users were presented with a message stating that the 1. Consequences of Authentication Service "federated realm object does not exist." Downtime It was established that the issue arose from a Authentication process failures can be change in Okta’s code, which was implemented as characterized as malfunctions that occur during part of a standard update process. Moreover, Okta the verification of user data required to grant used its internal service to update the metadata of access to the system. Downtime in the third-party integrations. At 10:37 AM, using this authentication service can lead to serious service, obsolete links to Dynamics 365 consequences for the system, disrupting user applications were removed, leading to access to key applications or platform functions. authentication failures for clients using domain Primarily, this can result in access being blocked federation without initialization. for both internal and external users, negatively affecting employee productivity and customer In an attempt to fix the issue, several attempts satisfaction. In the case of commercial platforms, were made to clear the application-level cache, but downtime can result in revenue loss, especially if these efforts were unsuccessful. At 4:25 PM, Okta users are unable to complete transactions or rolled back the configuration, but this did not access important services. Additionally, it creates restore the system since the earlier changes had security vulnerabilities, as users may resort to deleted important objects. After further analysis of unsafe methods to bypass authentication. the problem, clients were advised to reconfigure Authentication service downtime can also impact a their federated domains to resolve the issue. company’s reputation, undermining trust in the On November 16, Okta released guidance for system’s reliability [1]. clients to resolve the authentication issue in However, even the most advanced infrastructures Microsoft Office 365. Despite efforts to find a are susceptible to failures, which can have solution that did not require client action, the significant consequences for both users and optimal option turned out to be a manual businesses as a whole. Analyzing real cases of reconfiguration of the domains. authentication service downtime allows for a To prevent similar incidents in the future, the deeper understanding of the nature of such following steps were outlined: temporary incidents, their impact on system operations and su