By Ameer Khan
Modern organizations are increasingly switching to cloud adoption to enjoy the benefits of outsourcing important business operations. According to a 2021 study, up to 90% of organizations surveyed now employ cloud computing, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) services.
SaaS solutions allow organizations to achieve important goals, like cost reductions and faster time-to-market. But, like most products in digital transformation, they also expose organizations to cybersecurity threats.
As customers to contracts involving third-party vendors, organizations ultimately have to entrust their sensitive data into the hands of these vendors once they sign on. However, the responsibility for a breach in data due to the inadequate data security practices of a SaaS provider ultimately falls on the shoulders of the client organization.
In this article, we intend take a look at the top 9 cybersecurity risks associated with SaaS solutions and provide you steps for how your organization can address these risks in order to prevent data breaches.
Table of Contents
- Cloud Security Misconfigurations
- Third-Party Vulnerability
- Data Access Vulnerability
- Unsecure APIs
- Insufficient Incident Response
- Mobile Device Security
- Data Backups
- DDoS Attacks
- Phishing Attacks
1. Cloud Security Misconfigurations
Most SaaS products add layers of complexity to their system which can lead to cloud misconfiguration. This means any errors, glitches, or gaps that can expose your environment to serious cyber threats during cloud adoption. These threats include security breaches, ransomware, malware, external hackers, or internal threats that take advantage of vulnerabilities or misconfigurations to access your network.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Regularly audit and update cloud configurations: Find areas needing potential improvements and optimizations, as well as risks, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.
- Use automated tools to detect misconfigurations: Conduct network security assessments to identify cybersecurity gaps, missing protective controls, and network vulnerabilities within your network.
- Implement the principle of least privilege: Provide users with the bare minimum levels of access (permissions) needed to fulfill their job functions, thereby limiting any internal threats.
2. Third-Party Vulnerability:
SaaS companies are exposed to third-party risk due to the nature of relying on a supply chain network involving third-party vendors. Third parties can present various levels of threat exposure to an organization’s information security. Because sensitive data like publicly identifiable information (PII) is stored or accessed by most SaaS apps, your organization’s protection is only as strong as the weakest link in your supply chain.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Vet third-party vendors for security practices: Conduct comprehensive background checks of vendors and their employees to ensure they’re following industry security regulatory standards.
- Implement contractual obligations for security standards: Setting expectations and obligations from the start will save you unnecessary trouble down the road.
- Regularly monitor and assess third-party security: Conduct routine security assessments of third-party vendors in your supply chain network to ensure regular upkeep with info-sec standards.
3. Data Access Vulnerability:
Due to the existence of sensitive data, maintaining access control is vital for SaaS applications. Unauthorized access to sensitive data is a common problem for many organizations where it’s been shown that up to 36% of employees had access to systems even after leaving the job. This poses a serious security risk for SaaS companies and should be a top priority when it comes to threat mitigation.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Implement strong access controls: By defining roles and permissions based on job responsibilities, you’re restricting access to certain functionalities and data, minimizing the risk of unauthorized actions.
- Encrypt sensitive data: Use encryption mechanisms like SSL or TSL to transform sensitive data into unreadable ciphertext, making it useless to malicious actors should they acquire it.
- Conduct regular access audits: Implement strategies like keeping access policies up-to-date and reflecting changes in job roles, responsibilities, and organizational structure.
4. Unsecure APIs:
APIs serve a crucial role in the integration of various software within an organization by allowing for seamless communication and data exchange between different applications. Unfortunately, this also means vulnerabilities in APIs can lead to serious data breaches as they provide hackers with easy access to sensitive information stored on multiple programs, leading to identity theft, fraud, and a total loss of trust between developers and users
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Regularly assess and secure APIs: Conduct tests to uncover possible vulnerabilities, simulate diverse attack scenarios, and assess the effectiveness of your existing security protocols.
- Use encryption and authentication mechanisms: Use encryption protocols to render sensitive data useless to hackers and emplace authentication mechanisms allowing only authorized individuals access.
- Monitor and log API activity: Keep a log of user activity to analyze which individuals are accessing the API system and how frequently, making it easier to narrow down any breach causes should such an incident arise.
5. Insufficient Incident Response:
With the growing intensity of online information storage and transfer, there is a corresponding increase in potential weak points in an organization’s supply chain providing multiple potential opportunities for malicious actors. Therefore, an organization lacking an incident response plan is missing a major component in its infosec strategy and exposing itself to legal consequences, on top of cyber threats.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Develop and regularly update an incident response plan: By having predefined response procedures, you’ll be able to take immediate actions to contain and mitigate the impact of a security incident, thereby minimizing potential damage.
- Conduct drills and simulations: Periodically test your incident response plan, spot any gaps in its defenses, and evaluate its level of preparedness to tackle security incidents.
- Learn from past incidents to improve response: Evaluate past security incidents and note previous responses to curtail those threats, see where necessary improvements can be made, and suggest various solutions.
6. Mobile Device Security:
As more organizations incorporate mobile apps to process, store, and transmit data, this leaves plenty of gaps in infosec when it comes to employees using mobile devices for work-related activities. For this reason, a crucial element for organizations using mobile devices is the implementation of various strategies and policies designed to address the usage of these devices as it relates to accessing and storing sensitive data and the potential security risks that come with this.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Implement mobile device management (MDM) policies: Such a policy gives you numerous advantages, including security measures and guidelines for data and application usage pertaining to corporate information.
- Enforce encryption on mobile devices: Encrypt data on mobile devices using mechanisms like full disk encryption (FDE) to render the data’s access useless without an authentication key should the device fall into the wrong hands.
- Use secure communication protocols for mobile access: Implement mobile cryptographic communication protocols like TLS and SSL to ensure a secure and reliable data transfer over the internet, including mobile applications.
7. Data Backups:
Often many causes for the loss of crucial data are not due to machine or equipment failure but rather the human element, whether it’s attacks from external threats or even lack of oversight by those in charge of securing the sensitive information. This includes insufficient or inadequate backup procedures. Besides the obvious financial and productivity losses, data loss incidents risk damaging your brand’s image and jeopardizing your organization’s advantages over its competition.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Regularly backup data with versioning: This ability allows you to backup and recover the latest iteration of a data set should the necessity arise.
- Test backup restoration processes: Conduct frequent and routine tests of your backup restoration process to familiarize your organization with its backup and recovery systems.
- Ensure offsite storage for critical data backups: Ensures that a version of your critical data is stored in another geographical location (or even on the cloud), protecting it from any disasters or security breaches that could impact your primary server.
8. DDoS Attacks:
Although not a data breach threat, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks involve flooding an organization’s web server with traffic, causing it to crash. Such attacks shut down the target network, denying its intended users access while costing the victim significant time and money to recover. According to Microsoft, in 2022 alone they mitigated 520,000 unique attacks against their global infrastructure.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Use DDoS mitigation services: These are vendors offering dedicated DDoS protection services, including appliance-based vendors, communication service providers (CSPs), content delivery network (CDN) vendors, hosting providers, and cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) vendors.
- Implement load balancing: Efficiently distribute incoming network traffic and corresponding requests across multiple backend servers to ensure a smooth user interface and prevent server crashes from network overload.
- Have redundancy and failover mechanisms: This means having a backup server in case the primary one becomes overwhelmed and crashes, as well as having more than one of the same file or operating system in case one fails or isn’t working, you can rely on another identical file or system.
9. Phishing Attacks:
Some may consider phishing attacks a pesky nuisance, but the danger posed by them is far greater than most perceive. Phishing attacks can seriously damage your organization’s operations. Once an attacker has penetrated your network, they can install malware or ransomware, which can wreak havoc and cause system outages.
Ways your organization can mitigate the threat:
- Employee training on recognizing and avoiding phishing attacks: Implement frequent and routine training programs for your employees on how to detect phishing attacks.
- Use email filtering tools: These tools scan links and attachments contained within emails, detect any malicious websites, and counter phishing attempts through vendor or domain impersonation.
- Regularly simulate phishing attacks for awareness: Send out frequent but irregular phishing emails and text messages to test your organizations preparedness and to spread awareness of any breaches.
Keeping in mind the rapid growth in organizations depending on the cloud for storage of sensitive data, as well as their reliance on a supply chain of third-party vendors, it is important to be aware of the different risks that come with this and how to mitigate them.
Arming yourself with this knowledge can save your organization from irreparable reputational and financial damage in the long-run. Damage that is easily avoidable.