SaaS applications are crucial for enhancing productivity and operational efficiency within modern organizations. However, with every new application comes increased security risks related to app integrations and multiple users, which can become easy access points for cybercriminals. As a testament to these growing concerns, a report published by XM Cyber in May 2024 highlighted that identity and credential misconfigurations were the cause of 80% of security exposures.
1. The Risks of SaaS Applications
Organizations increasingly rely on SaaS applications to streamline their operations and boost productivity. Despite their many advantages, SaaS applications present significant security challenges. Each new app integrated into an organization’s ecosystem introduces potential vulnerabilities, including misconfigured identities and credentials. These vulnerabilities are prime targets for threat actors looking to exploit gaps in security protocols.
A 2024 report by XM Cyber underscores the severity of these risks, indicating that identity and credential misconfigurations accounted for 80% of security exposures. Given the frequency and complexity of these breaches, it’s critical for organizations to implement robust security measures to protect their sensitive data. The interconnected nature of SaaS applications means that even subtle signs of a compromise can have far-reaching consequences, often going unnoticed until a significant breach occurs.
2. Importance of SaaS Visibility and Coverage
To effectively secure their SaaS environments, organizations must first achieve complete visibility and coverage of their entire SaaS stack. Traditional solutions like IAM and PAM often fall short in adequately covering SaaS applications. This lack of comprehensive coverage can leave organizations vulnerable to threats lurking in the shadows, commonly referred to as shadow IT.
Existing security measures may fail to detect multiple third-party integrations and hidden apps within an organization’s SaaS ecosystem. Such blind spots impede security teams’ ability to monitor the network and enforce security protocols effectively. Therefore, gaining full visibility into all SaaS accounts, apps, and third-party integrations is the foundational step toward safeguarding against potential security threats and unauthorized access.
3. Wing Security’s Non-Intrusive Discovery Approach
Wing Security offers a non-intrusive discovery approach that connects through APIs rather than relying on invasive agents or proxies. By interfacing directly with major identity providers like Okta, Google Workspace, and Azure AD, as well as business-critical SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, Wing Security obtains a comprehensive identity map of the organization’s SaaS ecosystem.
This approach helps in identifying both human and non-human identities, including service accounts and API keys. It brings to light app-to-app connectivity and third-party integrations, highlighting their permission scopes. Furthermore, it covers the status of MFA implementations and detects admins in various SaaS applications. Wing Security’s emphasis on broad visibility reveals hidden security risks associated with these integrations, allowing organizations to address them proactively.
4. SaaS Identity Threat Detection and Response
Understanding identity behavior within SaaS applications is crucial for effective threat detection and response. Wing Security leverages an identity-centric threat detection layer that maps identity events to comprehend how attackers operate. This methodology correlates various identity-based incidents and MITRE ATT&CK techniques to transform complex SaaS logs into coherent narratives. Such clarity simplifies the investigative process, reduces alert fatigue among security analysts, and accelerates the median time to resolution (MTTR).
Each detected threat is enriched with detailed context, including threat intelligence pertaining to IP reputation, geolocation, VPN/Tor usage, and other pertinent factors. This enrichment ensures that security analysts can quickly grasp the attacker’s strategies and take swift action to mitigate the impact, rather than spending days sifting through raw logs. This streamlined process enables organizations to respond to incidents more efficiently and effectively protect their SaaS environments.
5. Real-Life Example of Identity Exploitation
Consider a real-life example that illustrates the steps a hacker might take to exploit identities within a SaaS environment. Initially, the attacker conducts a password spray attack, targeting multiple user accounts without triggering lockout mechanisms. During the reconnaissance phase, the attacker uses the same user agent for login attempts across various accounts, systematically testing credentials.
Once the attacker compromises an account using these credentials, they escalate the account’s privileges by assigning administrative roles within Entra ID. With these elevated privileges, the attacker gains access to OAuth-connected third-party services like GitHub. The final step involves data exfiltration from GitHub, where the attacker downloads private repositories containing sensitive information, such as source code and API keys, effectively breaching the organization’s defenses.
6. Attack Timeline and Visualization
An attack path timeline offers a simplified and contextual view of how threats unfold, surpassing the clarity provided by raw logs alone. This timeline presents each detection with relevant context, including information about the affected identity, the trigger event, and details like app, timestamp, and geolocation. By mapping each detection to established MITRE ATT&CK techniques, the timeline provides a chronological view that aids in visualizing the attack’s progression.
Such detailed visualization is invaluable for security operations teams, enabling them to identify the sequence of events, recognize patterns, and connect seemingly unrelated anomalies with routine activities. This contextualization helps in understanding the broader implications of each detection and facilitates a more accurate and timely response to threats. By enriching alerts with additional context and indicators of compromise (IoCs), security teams can significantly reduce investigation time and alert fatigue.
7. Threat Prioritization
Not all security threats pose the same level of risk. Wing Security assigns breach confidence scores to each detected threat, quantifying the likelihood of a successful breach. This score is calculated based on several factors, including the type and number of detections per threat and the specific tactics used, such as initial access or exfiltration. This scoring system allows security operations teams to prioritize their focus on the most critical threats first. For instance, while a single failed login attempt from a new IP might be deemed low priority, a successful login followed by data exfiltration would be assigned a higher confidence score and necessitate immediate attention. The prioritized threat queue presented in Wing’s dashboard helps cut through the noise and ensures that high-severity threats are addressed promptly.
8. Tracking Threat Status and Progress
Effective threat management requires a structured approach to tracking and resolving each identified threat. Wing Security provides functionalities that help security operations teams stay organized and ensure that no threat slips through the cracks. Teams can flag threats for follow-up, trigger webhook events to integrate with external systems like SIEM or SOAR, and continuously update the threat status based on ongoing investigations by SOC and IR teams. This comprehensive tracking structure ensures that all threats are monitored from identification to resolution, maintaining a clear record of actions taken and progress made. By keeping statuses updated and utilizing external integrations, security teams can streamline their processes, improve collaboration, and enhance their overall efficiency in managing and mitigating threats.
9. Speedy Resolution with Clear Mitigation Guides
When security teams need to address a specific threat, they benefit from having a clear and concise mitigation playbook. Wing Security provides customized mitigation guides tailored to the specific attack type and SaaS application involved. These guides include detailed recommendations for each detection type and offer relevant documentation, such as instructions for configuring Okta policies.
Additionally, best practices for addressing the root cause and preventing recurrence are provided, ensuring that organizations do not merely treat the symptoms but eliminate the underlying vulnerabilities. By offering these targeted mitigation steps, Wing Security enables security operations teams to respond quickly and effectively to threats, minimizing the potential damage and restoring security posture efficiently.
10. Preventing Recurrence by Addressing Root Causes
Preventing future security incidents requires a thorough examination of the underlying risk factors that allowed the initial threat to succeed. Rather than solely focusing on the symptoms of an active breach, security teams must address the root causes to ensure that similar threats do not recur. Wing Security’s layered platform combines SaaS security posture management (SSPM) with identity threat detection capabilities to achieve this goal.
Wing continuously monitors for misconfigurations based on frameworks such as CISA’s SCuBA, pinpointing risky settings like accounts without MFA or admin tokens that never expire. This proactive stance allows organizations to rectify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, creating a more resilient security posture and reducing the likelihood of future breaches.
11. Strengthening SaaS Security
SaaS applications play a vital role in boosting productivity and operational efficiency in modern organizations. These tools streamline processes and make teamwork more seamless. However, with each new application added, there comes a higher risk of security threats, especially regarding app integrations and the numerous users accessing these platforms. These access points can be exploited by cybercriminals. Reflecting the growing concerns over these vulnerabilities, a report released by XM Cyber in May 2024 revealed that misconfigurations in identity and credentials were responsible for 80% of security breaches. This statistic underlines the importance of paying close attention to security measures when adopting new SaaS applications. Ensuring proper configuration and robust security protocols is crucial to safeguarding sensitive information and maintaining the integrity of organizational data. Without stringent security practices, the advantages SaaS applications offer can quickly be overshadowed by the potential cyber threats they introduce.