Access Control | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In cybersecurity, the old adage "trust but verify" emphasizes that granting trust should always be accompanied by oversight. Yet, with software-as-a-service (SaaS), organizations often stop at the "trust" part and never get around to the "verify." SaaS environments in 2025 run on implicit trust. Once a user or app is authenticated and given access, it's largely trusted indefinitely. Tokens issued to third-party apps rarely expire, integrations often get more permissions than they truly need, and automations execute with minimal human oversight. We talk about Zero Trust principles, but in practice, many SaaS platforms grant one-time approval and then assume all is well thereafter. The result is a growing security gap, where credentials and connections are implicitly trusted far beyond what's safe, creating fertile ground for breaches and abuse. Implicit Trust in the SaaS Ecosystem Every SaaS integration or API token represents an implicit trust relationship between your organizatio...

As SaaS ecosystems expand, not every user is human anymore. AI assistants, automation bots, integration services, and API tokens now perform countless actions across business cloud applications, often with the same or greater access privileges as employees. These non-human identities (NHIs) are silently driving productivity while introducing a new class of risk: unmonitored, long-lived, and often misunderstood access. These machine credentials (service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, etc.) are essential for automation and integrations, but their growth far outpaces the oversight and security controls applied to them. The result is a widening visibility gap. A lot of NHI types enjoy broad permissions within SaaS apps, sometimes more privileges than a human user, yet they rarely get the same scrutiny as employee accounts. Over-privilege is common: about one-third of SaaS app integrations have access to sensitive data that exceeds their needs. Let's examine a few notable data brea...

I have been a Star Wars fan since the moment I took my seat in the theatre and saw Princess Leia's rebel ship trying to outrun an Imperial Star Destroyer. It's impossible to see that movie (or its greatest successor, Andor ) and not take the side of the underdog rebels, who are determined to escape the iron fist of imperial control. Of course, in my work as a security professional, "control" is the name of the game. I've spent as much of my career trying to stop my own end-users from going outside the lines as I have trying to guard against malicious outsiders. I personally still think I'm the good guy, since my ultimate goal is to protect sensitive data, but I understand why IT and security teams are often seen as the bad guys. After all, we do operate according to something called the "rule of no." It's not great branding, and increasingly, it just isn't working. Here's the situation in 2025: we have a galaxy's worth of diverse applications, devices, and user identities accessing...

Across industries, businesses are focused on achieving key objectives such as: Driving sustainable revenue growth Reducing costs and improving efficiency Strengthening security and ensuring compliance Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is central to these goals. A robust CIAM solution doesn't just enable seamless user authentication and access—it unifies identity across an organization's digital ecosystem. This ensures that customers can engage consistently across all channels while enabling sales, marketing, and support teams to leverage a single, authoritative view of each user. Moreover, outsourcing Customer Identity to an extensible CIAM platform enhances agility, freeing developers to focus on core applications. This results in faster development cycles, improved user experiences, and quicker time-to-market. From a security perspective, CIAM is critical for protecting user data, preventing identity-based threats, and meeting regulatory requirements. However, t...

Throughout history, societies have protected their most valuable assets by building walls, fortresses, and moats. Whether it was a medieval castle or an ancient city-state, security meant keeping threats on the outside and creating barriers around the things that mattered most.  We took these principles with us as we moved into the digital age, designing network security with firewalls, access controls, and gated perimeters to protect digital assets. Firewalls and network devices became our virtual walls, defining trusted and untrusted zones, and keeping the "bad actors" at the gate. For years, this perimeter-based approach was the primary line of defense in the world of cybersecurity, establishing a digital fortress around systems and data. But just as history has shown us that walls and borders can be breached, so too has modern cybersecurity taught us that no perimeter is foolproof. As organizations increasingly connect their IT systems to the wider internet and integrate the...