How We Knew the Oracle Breach Was Real

Apr 10, 2025

What happens when your company appears on a breach exposure list, but nothing in your logs backs it up?

Sarah W. Frazier

This webinar will cover:

What happens when your company appears on a breach exposure list, but nothing in your logs backs it up?

That’s exactly what happened to countless organizations after the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) breach. When the breach news hit, Oracle denied the incident. Similarly, many organizations dismissed the story, thinking: “We don’t use Oracle Cloud.” Even as exposed company domains began circulating in underground forums, the assumption was that the data was unrelated—or simply fake. OCI wasn’t a sanctioned app nor did it didn’t appear in the organization’s inventory. No alerts were triggered. No obvious connection. But their names were still on the list...was this a scam?

Debunking the Skepticism

While many companies dismissed the breach as irrelevant, Grip engineers did what security teams do every day: they validated, cross-referencing the published list of compromised company domains with OCI tenant activity across our customers. They found that 41% of them had active tenants, many of which the security teams weren’t aware of.

Some were shadow tenants. Others were created through third-party services or automation, but there was no disputing the accounts were there. Weeks before Oracle privately admitted what it publicly denied, the Grip team was working with those organizations to help customers assess and contain their exposure, including rotating passwords on all known and unknown OCI accounts, and reviewing and enforcing MFA, including accounts linked to shadow tenants.

The breach was real—even if the official statements hadn’t caught up yet. But for those who had visibility, the response had already begun.

Why There Was Doubt

So how did companies end up on a breach exposure list without ever realizing they were at risk? It comes down to a challenge we see every day: shadow SaaS.

In our most recent SaaS Security Risks Report, Grip analysts found that 85% of SaaS apps in the average enterprise are not centrally managed. They're not provisioned through IT, connected to identity providers, and they don’t show up in traditional tooling. That’s how risk hides in plain sight. Oracle Cloud is a perfect example.

The impact of the OCI breach is far greater than people realize. With only three percent market share officially, OCI adoption is far higher due to a free tier that makes it incredibly easy to create an account; anyone in the organization can start a new tenant in minutes. Maybe it’s a developer who has a legitimate need to support a new project, uses it for a period until the project ends, then the project wraps up, people move on… and the tenant stays behind. Forgotten. Unmonitored. Still accessible.

And when a breach hits, no one remembers that it’s even there. These tenants aren’t malicious. They’re just invisible. They exist in the margins—outside of governance, outside of inventory, outside of most teams’ visibility. And when an incident happens, like the Oracle Cloud breach, time is of the essence to contain the impact.

Closing the Gap Before It Widens

By the time most teams react to a breach, the damage has already started. What makes the difference isn’t just whether you respond—it’s how fast and how confidently you do it. That’s where Grip comes in.

When the Oracle breach surfaced, our customers weren’t scrambling to figure out if they were affected. They already knew. Grip had surfaced every Oracle tenant—approved, rogue, forgotten—in minutes. And with that visibility came action.

Through the Grip Policy Center, teams were able to:

Automate password rotation across impacted tenants.

Lock down access for accounts outside identity provider control.

Trigger real-time alerts for shadow usage that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

This is what modern SaaS incident response looks like—not just reacting but seeing clearly and acting fast. Prevention alone isn’t enough; despite your best efforts, breaches happen. Breach response starts with visibility, and visibility followed by focused action is where most organizations fall short. Grip helps close that gap—even before the breached organization owns up to the incident.

Curious if you have OCI tenants you don’t know about? We can help you find out. Book a demo now.

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