A sleek little app-store sidebar was silently introduced to the right side of your session screen by the most recent programme update, as you might have seen on your most recent Zoom calls. With the touch of a button and without even pausing their Zoom session, this feature enables any business user inside your company to connect the software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps displayed in the sidebar.
The fact that anyone within an organisation can deploy, administer, and manage SaaS applications emphasises both one of the major strengths and security threats associated with SaaS. Although this technique could be quick and simple for business enablement, it also intentionally avoids any internal security review procedures.
As a result, your security team is unable to identify which applications are being adopted and used, as well as whether or not they may be vulnerable to security threats, whether or not they are being used securely, or how to put security barriers in place to prevent unauthorised access to them. Zero-trust security principles become nearly hard to enforce.
Joint Obligation
Companies need to understand that they are continually being urged by vendors to install additional apps and adopt new features before they reprimand their staff for recklessly utilising SaaS applications. Indeed, the applications themselves frequently meet crucial business demands, and sure, employees naturally want to use them right away without waiting for a drawn-out security evaluation.
But, whether they are aware of it or not, they are acting in this way because shrewd application providers are actively marketing to them and frequently tricking users into thinking they are adhering to security best practices. Users are not always reading the consent text displayed on the consent screens that are intended to give users pause during installation and nudge them to read about their rights and obligations.
Always be cautious
In other circumstances, security is frequently presumed. Consider well-known brands' application markets. Vendors do not have the motivation, financial interest, or capacity to assess the security posture of every third-party application sold on their marketplaces. Yet, in order to promote the business, they may mislead users into believing that anything sold there retains the same level of protection as the marketplace vendor, frequently by omission. Similarly, market descriptions may be worded in such a way as to imply that their application was developed in partnership with or approved by a significant, secure brand.
The use of application marketplaces results in third-party integrations that pose the same vulnerabilities as those that led to numerous recent assaults. During the April 2022 GitHub assault campaign, attackers were able to steal and exploit legitimate Heroku and Travis-CI OAuth tokens issued to well-known suppliers. According to GitHub, the attackers were able to steal data from dozens of GitHub customers and private repositories by using the trust and high access offered to reputable vendors.
Similarly, CircleCI, a provider focusing in CI/CD and DevOps technologies, reported in December 2022 that some customer data was stolen in a data breach. The investigation was sparked by a hacked GitHub OAuth token. According to the CircleCI team's research, the attackers were able to obtain a valid session token from a CircleCI engineer, allowing them to bypass the two-factor authentication mechanism and gain unauthorised access to production systems. They were able to steal consumer variables, tokens, and keys as a result.
An Attraction to Frictionless Adoption
Vendors also design their platforms and incentive plans to make adoption as simple as accepting a free trial, a lifetime free service tier, or swiping a credit card, frequently with alluring discounts to try and buy without commitment.
Vendors want users to adopt any exciting, new capability immediately, so they remove all barriers to adoption, including going around ongoing IT and security team reviews. It is hoped that an application will prove to be too well-liked by business users and crucial to corporate operations to be removed, even if security personnel become aware of its use.
Making adoption too simple, however, can also result in a rise in the number of underutilised, abandoned, and exposed apps. An app can frequently continue to function after it has been rejected during a proof of concept (PoC), abandoned because users have lost interest in it, or the app owner has left the company. This results in an expanded and unprotected attack surface that puts the organisation and its data at greater risk.
While educating business users on SaaS security best practises is important, it's even more crucial to prevent SaaS sprawl by teaching them to think more critically about the seductive promises of quick deployment and financial incentives made by SaaS suppliers.
Additionally, security teams ought to use solutions that can help them manage risks associated with SaaS misconfiguration and SaaS-to-SaaS integrations. These technologies allow customers to continue utilising SaaS applications as required while also conducting security due diligence on new vendors and integrations and setting up crucial security barriers.