Identity threats in SaaS environments have become a primary attack vector, with cybercriminals exploiting compromised credentials, privilege misuse, and authentication weaknesses to infiltrate organizations. Security measures such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) often lack the necessary identity-centric visibility in SaaS applications to detect and stop these threats before they escalate.
With SaaS applications housing sensitive business data, user credentials, and privileged accounts, attackers have shifted their focus to exploiting gaps in identity and access management (IAM). This is why Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) has become an essential security approach, designed to detect and respond to identity-based threats in SaaS environments.
Why identity threats are a growing concern in SaaS
Identity-based attacks have risen dramatically in recent years, largely due to the increased reliance on SaaS applications. Unlike traditional security measures that primarily monitor endpoint and network activity, SaaS platforms present unique challenges:
- Lack of visibility: Without visibility into the entire SaaS ecosystem, SOC teams have no way to see what employees are downloading and what app-to-app integrations are there, leading to Shadow IT vulnerability.
- Decentralized access: Employees, contractors, and third-party vendors access SaaS applications from various locations and devices, increasing the potential for breaches.
- Identity sprawl: Organizations often have hundreds of SaaS applications, each with different access policies and permissions, making it difficult to track and manage identities.
- Credential-based attacks: Threat actors use tactics like phishing, brute force attacks, and credential stuffing to gain unauthorized access to SaaS applications.
- SaaS misconfigurations: A single misconfiguration, such as a super admin account without MFA is of high-value for attackers due to elevated access privileges.
The challenges of preventing identity-based attacks in SaaS
Preventing identity-based attacks in SaaS environments is particularly difficult due to several reasons:
Users are the weakest link
Human error is one of the most common entry points for attackers. Employees frequently fall victim to phishing scams, unknowingly exposing their login credentials. Even with security training, users may reuse passwords, share credentials, or fail to recognize social engineering tactics.
Credential-based attacks are hard to spot
Attackers use techniques like credential stuffing, where they test stolen passwords across multiple SaaS platforms, making it difficult to identify an ongoing attack, or where the attack originated. Most SaaS security tools don’t have the necessary behavioral analytics to detect when a legitimate user’s credentials have been compromised.
Third-party integrations increase risk
Many SaaS applications integrate with other services via OAuth tokens and API keys, which, if exposed, can grant attackers persistent access without triggering traditional security alerts. Unless the security solution specifically tracks identity attacks, it would be easy for these types of breaches to go undetected until it’s too late.
Alert fatigue is real
SecOp teams receive an overwhelming amount of alerts, including cloud and endpoint activity, making it challenging to distinguish real threats from false positives when it comes to SaaS. Attackers take advantage of this by conducting low-and-slow attacks, gradually escalating privileges over time to avoid detection.
How ITDR protects SaaS environments
ITDR provides organizations with the necessary tools to detect, analyze, and respond to identity-based attacks in real time. A comprehensive SaaS security solution with ITDR should mitigate identity risks in SaaS environments by focusing on:
1. Continuous monitoring
- Ongoing scanning of the organization’s SaaS ecosystem for newly onboarded applications, integrations and permissions granted
- Tracking of user behavior, login attempts, and access patterns across all SaaS applications for a full picture of the ecosystem
- Flagging of any abnormal user activity, such as logins from unusual locations, data exfiltration, or excessive data destruction so SecOps teams can investigate and respond rapidly
2. Threat intelligence and confidence-based risk scoring
- Assess risk levels and predict potential threats
- Utilize risk scoring models to prioritize incidents based on severity
3. Rapid response to serious threats
- Guides and playbooks to respond to identity threats in real time
- Actions such as revoking access, forcing password resets, and blocking malicious sessions that can be executed automatically
Wing Security’s ITDR
At Wing Security, we recognize the urgent need for identity protection in SaaS environments. That’s why we’ve developed ground-breaking ITDR capabilities for our customers.
Here’s what Wing Security’s ITDR includes:
- Comprehensive SaaS Identity Coverage: Monitors both human and non-human identities across SaaS applications, eliminating blind spots.
- Identity-Centric Timeline: Maps security incidents by identity, creating a clear and chronological timeline of events. This helps detect multi-stage attacks early and reduces security blind spots caused by fragmented identity tracking.
- Complete Attack Story: Correlates identity events using MITRE ATT&CK tactics to present a clear and complete attack story, reducing investigation time and gaps.
- Context-Rich Insights: Alerts are enriched with IP geolocation and privacy information, darknet intelligence, identity risk factors, and attack stage based on MITRE ATT&CK techniques – prioritizing threats for your team for a quick and efficient response.
- Prioritization Scoring: Aggregates fragmented SaaS logs and applies dynamic confidence scoring, including behavior analytics (UEBA) to detect anomalies in identity behavior to spot lateral movement and privilege abuse.
- Ready-to-use Incident Timeline for Incident Reports: Transforms scattered alerts into a structured, easy-to-read report, reducing the investigation time and simplifying the incident report.
- Mitigation Playbooks: Provides step-by-step remediation guidance, reducing manual security workload and enabling a faster response.
- Seamless SIEM/SOAR Integrations: Enabling centralized alert management and automated workflows to enrich and act on incidents across the security stack.
Wondering if you have the solution you need to prevent and stop SaaS identity-based attacks? Talk to one of our experts to find out.