Here’s how your employees’ engagement and active participation in SaaS application security can help protect your company.
While SaaS applications provide tremendously important benefits, it’s important to take steps to ensure that your organization’s SaaS application security posture is strong and robust and that your employees are using these apps safely.
SaaS Security and Untrained Employees: The Risks
Although many SaaS apps are relatively straightforward and easy to use, it’s possible that your employees are onboarding these apps incorrectly. It’s far too common for users to click “allow all” when an app prompts them for access and permissions, and this simple move can potentially create serious security concerns for your organization.
User inconsistencies, risky behavior, misconfiguration and incorrect onboarding processes of apps, to name a few, can foster situations in which a tool goes from being helpful to a possible entry point for cybercriminals. It’s clear that building a strong SaaS application security culture, paired with engaged employees who are actively involved, is of paramount importance for protecting your company.
Recently, a number of major cryptocurrency companies revealed that they’d been hacked. Notably, the cybercriminals were able to breach the firms via the HubSpot application. A hacker had conducted a social engineering attack against a HubSpot employee, which captured the employee’s credentials and persuaded the employee to provide the necessary multi-factor authentication.
Because HubSpot is a staple app to which customers generally grant blanket permissions, the hacker was able to easily penetrate the crypto firms and gain access to sensitive data and information.
In a statement after the breach, HubSpot said that it “terminated access for the compromised employee account. We then launched a wide-scale investigation to ensure we fully understood the event. We engaged a third-party forensics firm on this investigation to partner with our internal teams.”
After the incident, the statement continued, HubSpot has “taken steps to enhance our security and to prevent a similar attack from occurring in the future. While our investigation has concluded and remediation completed, we remain committed to improving our security through regular assessments and testing.”
Wing’s SaaS application security platform could have flagged this issue and automatically shut down access. Because Wing’s teams and technology are constantly monitoring and surveilling everything from leaked information on the darknet to detecting unusual behavior, risks are identified quickly so that companies can act swiftly to protect themselves.
“It’s far too common for users to click “allow all” when an app prompts them for access and permissions.”
Traditional SaaS Security Education and Management
In-person events, like company-wide seminars, are often the go-to for companies wanting to introduce their teams to the concept of SaaS application security. Monthly informative newsletters about the latest developments in SaaS security, plus general training and heightened onboarding training, are definitely helpful for making employees aware about SaaS application security as a concept.
But in today’s security landscape, where new threats are constantly emerging and cybercriminals are constantly revamping their penetration and breach strategies, these traditional SaaS application security education techniques are quickly losing their relevance.
That’s not to mention that leading these kinds of sessions are often a resource drain, taking valuable time away from your security leaders that could be better spent on actively managing risks. The good news is that there is a way to actively educate your employees on SaaS application security which is far more engaging and has a sustainable long-term impact.
SaaS Application Security and Your Business: A Way Forward
The key to creating a safe SaaS environment is nurturing a culture within your organization where SaaS application security is simply a part of everyday life. That means ensuring that SaaS security is painless, user-friendly, and time-efficient, rather than a burden or chore.
Integrating SaaS application security into your employees’ daily routines should be a priority. This enables them to understand how the interconnected nature of SaaS apps creates numerous entry points for cybercriminals and what they can do from the outset to stop this from happening.
A culture of security breeds conscientious, aware employees and more involved senior management. By educating everyone within an organization about the potential risks and challenges posed by SaaS apps, security leaders and employees alike can take ownership and control of an enterprise’s SaaS application security posture, if that’s what you want.
Wing’s solution provides an easy way to remediate risks that isn’t a headache for your team. Wing sends employees timely alerts on when and what SaaS risks they should immediately eliminate. They can remediate with just a click of a button, then get back to work.
The platform is customizable and you can adjust its settings to best suit your company’s needs. For example, you can set alerts to be received via Slack or email (or both), depending on the channels most frequently used by your employees. You can also determine how often employees get alerts from Wing, and you can set notifications according to the level of urgency.
Automation helps your teams get informed about what matters, take swift, real-time action, then quickly get back to their normal work days. Wing offers automated remediation, including notifications that guide users into taking appropriate next steps.
For example, employees can receive direct notifications about risky App2App connections or low security score apps that are being onboarded.
Wing also offers critical explanations into why a particular file or app was shut down, providing education to employees about risky software and how to avoid similar security issues in the future.
“…the interconnected nature of SaaS apps creates numerous entry points for cybercriminals.”
How Wing Strengthens Your SaaS Security Culture
Contact Wing Security to learn more about how we can help you create a strong security culture within your organization. Schedule a demo to try Wing’s platform for yourself and see how we can ease the burden on your security leaders via automated remediation.
