PREDI C TI VE I NTEL L I GE NC E
SaaS
nightmare:
The risks of collaboration
in the cloud
Software-as-a-Service tools offer major benefits to
modern organisations due to their collaborative nature –
but they are not without security risks. Justin Fier, Director
of Threat Intelligence and Analytics, Darktrace, discusses the
major vulnerabilities seen in Software-as-a-Service today and
looks at real life examples of attacks where AI cyberdefences have
been able to prevent a breach.
I
t’s no secret that
collaboration
is the bedrock
of business. In
fact, a Stanford
University study
demonstrated that
merely priming employees to act in a
collaborative fashion – without changing
their environment or workflow – makes
them more engaged, more persistent,
more successful and less fatigued.
such applications offer financial and
technical benefits to companies of all
sizes, from storage savings to reliable
connectivity to support speed. Yet it
is their collaborative nature that has
positioned SaaS software at the heart of
the modern enterprise.
To digitally optimise this biologically
ingrained capacity for teamwork,
businesses the world over have
adopted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
applications that facilitate the sharing of
information between multiple users. At the same time, the interactivity
of cloud services renders them
an attractive target for advanced
cybercriminals, who can often leverage
a single user’s SaaS credentials to
compromise dozens of other accounts.
And while leading SaaS vendors
conform to high security standards, the
cyberdefences they employ nonetheless
have a common weakness: human error
on the customer end.
Run via centralised, cloud-hosted data
centres rather than on local hardware, By launching sophisticated attacks,
today’s threat actors are increasingly
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Issue 16
gaining access to cloud services
through the front door, necessitating
a fundamentally different security
approach that can detect when
credentialled users behave – ever so
slightly – out of character.
Sensitive file access
Among the key challenges of SaaS
security is balancing the convenience
of open access to information with the
imperative of protecting privileged assets.
Indeed, with hundreds or even
thousands of employees sharing a
welter of files and databases at all times,
safeguarding SaaS applications against
insider threat is extraordinarily difficult
with traditional security tools, which use
fixed rules and signatures to catch only
known, external cyberattacks.
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