As technology implementation has become employee-led, on-time, from any location and device, IT and security departments have found themselves competing with an ever-expanding SaaS attack surface, much of which is often unknown or unmanaged. This greatly increases the risk of identity-based threats, and according to a recent CrowdStrike report, 80% of breaches today use compromised credentials, including cloud and SaaS credentials.
Given this reality, IT security managers need practical and effective SaaS security solutions designed to identify and manage their expanding SaaS footprint. Here are 5 key ways Nudge Security can help.
Close the visibility gap
Knowledge of the full range of SaaS programs in use is the foundation of a modern IT management program. Without understanding your entire SaaS footprint, you can’t tell for sure where your corporate IP is stored (has anyone synced their desktop with Dropbox?), you can’t make assumptions about customer data (has someone uploaded your customer list to a new marketing app site?), and you certainly can’t make firm claims about your production data (Has anyone cloned their environment into a new AWS account to recover from a support issue?).
But given the pace of SaaS adoption, it’s a never-ending, painful task to collect and maintain an accurate SaaS inventory. Nudge Security solves this problem in real time, continuously Discovering SaaS which does not require agents, browser plug-ins, network proxies or complex API configurations. Within minutes of starting your free trial, you’ll receive a comprehensive list of all SaaS accounts ever created by anyone in your organization, along with security context for each application, alerts about new applications, and the ability to automate SaaS management tasks .
Manage OAuth risks
Today, any employee has the ability to bring together multiple SaaS applications and data using no-code and low-code integrations that use authorization methods such as OAuth grants. This creates a complex web of SaaS applications, making it extremely difficult to answer the fundamental question: “who (and which SaaS applications) have access to my enterprise assets?” Attackers use this complexity to navigate the SaaS supply chain to get to the gems.
With this in mind, it is important that IT and security departments regularly review the OAuth permissions that have been implemented for their organization to identify and address over-permissive areas and connections between applications that may conflict with data privacy and compliance requirements.
This article provides an overview of the key steps for analyzing OAuth grants and assessing potential risks, as well as an overview of how Nudge Security provides the context needed to simplify this process.
Monitor the SaaS attack surface
Recent high-profile SaaS supply chain breaches at Circle CI, Okta, and Slack reflect a growing trend of attackers targeting enterprise SaaS tools to infiltrate customer environments. As mentioned above, the complex and interconnected nature of today’s SaaS attack surface allows attackers to navigate the software supply chain to find valuable assets.
Given this reality, it is important to understand which corporate assets are visible to attackers from the outside and can therefore be targeted. The SaaS attack surface potentially extends to every SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS application, account, user credential, OAuth authorization, API, and SaaS provider used in your organization—managed or unmanaged. Monitoring this attack surface can seem like a Sisyphean task, given that any user with a credit card or even a corporate email address can expand an organization’s attack surface with just a few clicks.
Nudge Security includes a SaaS attack surface dashboard to show you all the external assets an attacker can see, including SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, social media accounts, registered domains, and more. With this visibility, you can take proactive steps to minimize and protect the SaaS attack surface.
Expand SSO coverage
Single sign-on (SSO) provides a centralized place to manage employee access to enterprise SaaS applications, making it an integral part of any modern SaaS identity and access management program. Most organizations strive to ensure that all business-critical applications (such as those that handle customer data, financial data, source code, etc.) are registered with SSO. However, when new SaaS applications are implemented outside of IT management processes, this makes it difficult to truly assess SSO coverage.
Nudge Security shows you which apps are SSO-enrolled (and which aren’t), along with the context within each app, so you can properly prioritize when enabling SSO. When you’re ready to enable new applications in your SSO tool, Nudge Security initiates SSO enablement workflows to ease the process.
Expanding the use of MFA
Multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to protect user accounts from unauthorized access. By requiring multiple verification factors, such as a password and a unique code sent to the mobile device, it greatly reduces the chances of hackers gaining access to sensitive information. This is especially important in today’s digital landscape, where identity-based attacks are becoming more common.
With Nudge Security, you can see which user accounts have MFA enabled (and not) enabled, and send “nudges” to users via email or Slack to prompt them to enable MFA for their accounts. With a long tail of applications that are often adopted without IT oversight, this visibility helps IT groups ensure that SaaS security best practices are followed.
Start improving your SaaS security today
Nudge Security gives IT and security teams complete visibility into every SaaS and cloud asset ever created in their organizations (managed or unmanaged) and real-time alerts when new accounts are created. With this visibility, they can eliminate shadow IT, protect against fake accounts, minimize the SaaS attack surface, and automate tedious tasks, all without disrupting the pace of work.
Start a free 14-day trial here.
