Mar 26, 2025
Mar 26, 2025
The real story of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) breach isn’t about the back-and-forth details or the vulnerability that attackers exploited. It’s how prevalent OCI is and the number of companies who are using the service, whether they know it or not.
More than 140,000 cloud tenants potentially compromised. Over 6 million sensitive records exposed, including encrypted SSO, LDAP passwords, Java Keystone (JKS) files, and enterprise manager JPS keys.
But the real story of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) breach isn’t about the back-and-forth details or the vulnerability that attackers exploited. It’s how prevalent OCI is and the number of companies who are using the service, whether they know it or not.
Oracle has yet to own up to this incident, as it calls into question the security of their service. But it also raises a far more critical question: how many organizations even know they’re using OCI in the first place?
The answer, for many, is “they don’t.”
Despite OCI holding just 3% of the global cloud market share, it’s surprisingly well-adopted by a wide range of companies. While its footprint is small compared to giants like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, OCI has carved out a niche by catering to enterprises that rely heavily on Oracle’s database products. This tight integration makes it an attractive option. So, while OCI may not dominate in raw market share, its presence across major enterprises—and its strategic use cases—give it a bigger real-world impact than the numbers suggest.
These days, security professionals know that breaches are inevitable. What truly matters is how quickly and effectively you respond—especially when vulnerabilities are known and well publicized. In fact, some of the highest-profile breaches were prevented by companies that acted early to avoid becoming victims.
SolarWinds showed us the danger when malicious code is injected into software and the importance of supply chain visibility and security.
Log4J reminded us that even the smallest libraries can expose the largest attack surfaces.
The Snowflake incident revealed just how deep the rabbit hole goes with third-party cloud dependencies.
It’s no different with the recent OCI breach. The challenge isn’t just what happened, but where and how it's still unfolding and the potentially devastating downstream impact, just as we saw with the other incidents. And just like the other breaches, much of the damage stems from a lack of visibility of what is operating in an organization’s environment and programmatically addressing the risks. But this breach also adds another layer: the credentials that were compromised are encrypted, which means attackers are likely working to decrypt them as we speak, emphasizing a time-sensitive urgency for organizations to take action. Security teams have a small window of opportunity to defuse a ticking time bomb by acting fast, including rotating credentials and enforcing MFA—if you know what tenants exist in the first place.
Following the news of the Oracle Cloud breach, Grip engineers looked at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure usage across our customer base and found thousands of unique OCI tenants detected in 41% of our customers.
We share this to illustrate a point. OCI usage extends far and wide, and in most organizations, the security teams are not even aware OCI tenants exist—or catch all of them. Dark Reading reports the companies that may be affected include FedEx, PayPal, Fortinet, and Cloudflare. But even if they know they use OCI, are they aware of all their tenants?
Oracle Cloud offers a free tier, so it’s easy for developers to set up a test account, use it for a while, then the project ends and they forget about it. The situation is more common than you may think, and happens with other cloud services, too. In one case a Grip customer with AWS tenants thought they had 35 tenants, but Grip uncovered 350. That’s the nature of modern cloud infrastructure: it scales fast, spreads quietly, and often slips outside the lines of centralized governance.
That's what makes responding to these kinds of breaches so difficult. Rogue cloud tenants grow outside the view of security teams, unmonitored, and unmanaged. OCI and other cloud services make this especially easy. Like other modern SaaS platforms, adoption is frictionless. Just sign up, click a few buttons, and you're off and running. But with the ease of adoption brings risk—especially when a service is breached, because you don’t know how many tenants have been created.
The two primary risks companies must address in the OCI breach are:
It’s not just the active OCI accounts you should be worried about, but the ones you don’t know about that can seriously harm your organization. In response to this incident, security experts recommend an all-too familiar playbook: rotate passwords, enable MFA, review access logs. All sensible. All important. But there’s an unspoken assumption baked into those recommendations: that you already know where your Oracle tenants are, and who’s using them. And that’s where the real risk lives—not in the controls you’ve put in place, but in the ones you didn’t know you needed yet.
What separates a headline from a footnote is how fast you detect and respond. When news of a new security incident breaks, like the Oracle OCI breach, Grip helps security teams act quickly, with clarity. We accelerate your response and shrink the exposure window before it becomes a storyline.
With Grip, you can respond with speed and precision:
Detect all OCI tenants in use and who is using them across your organization in minutes, even the rogue and forgotten accounts that aren’t tied to your IdP or existing controls.
Act immediately using the Grip Policy Center. Automate workflows to enforce password resets or revoke user access and create an alert for your team the moment an incident occurs.
Grip is the difference between a fast, confident response and scrambling to catch up—or worse—seeing your company added to list of devasting losses.
Unfortunately, cybersecurity today can’t focus only on prevention. Breaches are going to happen. The differentiator now is how quickly you can detect exposure and act with precision. This isn’t just a story about Oracle or another breach headline. It’s an ongoing reminder that security teams are being held responsible for accounts they didn’t approve and often don’t even know exist. But Grip can help solve this challenge and we invite you to discover how. Book a free demo to learn more and find out if the OCI breach impacts your organization.
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