Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Michael Colori. I'm a senior editor here at Wired.

Lauren Good is out this week. She will be back next time. But joining me today is Wired senior writer, Lily Hey Newman.

Hi, Lily. Hello. I'm happy to be here. Well, thanks for,

being here. It's just the two of us this week, so hopefully we can keep things interesting for everybody.

I know. I feel Lauren's absence keenly. I'm alone in a room with the producer, so I do as well.

Lily, we wanted to have you on this week because you just wrote a series of big stories for Wired about the recent hack of the digital identity provider, Octa, and the group of hackers who claimed responsibility, a group that calls itself Lapsus. That's L-A-P-S-U-S-S-Dolar sign.

Obviously.

Obviously.

We hear a lot of stories about corporate hacking, ransomware attacks, and data breaches.

And while all of those stories are concerning for sure, this particular hack is

especially troubling because of the target.

Octa is a service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to manage their

employees' logins

to their various cloud services. Now, we have you on the show this week to walk us through

the timeline here and to help us get a sense of the scope of this hack. So in order to better

understand all of that, I want to start by talking about the target. We use Octahear at

Wired every day, and many of our listeners are deeply familiar with it.

But for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us what is Octa?

Yeah.

So, ACTA is, as you said, an identity management platform.

So basically, the concept is if you're a business and your employees need to use lots of different cloud

platforms and services to do their jobs. So right, there's email, but then there's also, let's say,

...