Shadow IT | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

SaaS services are one of the biggest drivers of OpEx (operating expenses) for modern businesses. With Gartner projecting $247.2 billion in global SaaS spending this year , it's no wonder SaaS budgets are a big deal in the world of finance and IT. Efficient SaaS utilization can significantly affect both the bottom line and employee productivity.  In this article, we'll break down this topic that sits at the intersection of finance and IT and walk through what SaaS budget planning is, why it matters, and how you can avoid common SaaS budgeting mistakes. Are you planning Your 2025 Budget? You're likely wasting 25% of your SaaS spend—ready to reclaim it? Start a FREE 14-Day SaaS Management Trial and Save 25% of Your 2025 SaaS Spend. What is SaaS budget planning? SaaS budget planning is the process of creating budget plans for SaaS expenses within an organization. The process typically involves collaboration between finance, IT, and SaaS application owners.  On the surface, ...

As technology adoption has shifted to be employee-led, just in time, and from any location or device, IT and security teams have found themselves contending with an ever-sprawling SaaS attack surface, much of which is often unknown or unmanaged. This greatly increases the risk of identity-based threats, and according to a recent report from CrowdStrike, 80% of breaches today use compromised identities, including cloud and SaaS credentials. Given this reality, IT security leaders need practical and effective  SaaS security solutions  designed to discover and manage their expanding SaaS footprint. Here are 5 key ways Nudge Security can help. Close the visibility gap Knowing the full scope of SaaS apps in use is the foundation of a modern IT governance program. Without an understanding of your entire SaaS footprint, you cannot say with confidence where your corporate IP is stored (Did someone sync their desktop to Dropbox?), you cannot make assumptions about your customer da...

In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, safeguarding your organization against cyberattacks is more critical than ever. Traditional penetration testing (pentesting), while effective, often falls short due to its high costs, resource requirements, and infrequent implementation. Automated internal and external network pentesting is a game-changing solution, empowering organizations to stay ahead of attackers with cost-effective, frequent, and thorough security assessments. Strengthen Your Defenses: The Role of Internal and External Pentests  Effective cybersecurity requires addressing threats from both inside and outside your organization. Automated solutions streamline this process, enabling IT teams to implement a holistic and proactive defense strategy. Internal Pentesting: Securing the Core Internal pentesting simulates an attacker operating within your network, exposing vulnerabilities such as insider threats, compromised credentials, or breaches through physical or ...

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on thei...

Designed to be more than a one-time assessment— Wing Security's SaaS Pulse provides organizations with actionable insights and continuous oversight into their SaaS security posture—and it's free! Introducing SaaS Pulse: Free Continuous SaaS Risk Management  Just like waiting for a medical issue to become critical before seeing a doctor, organizations can't afford to overlook the constantly evolving risks in their SaaS ecosystems. New SaaS apps, shifting permissions, and emerging threats mean risks are always in motion. SaaS Pulse makes it easy to treat SaaS risk management as an ongoing practice, not just an occasional check-up. Security teams instantly get a real-time security "health" score, prioritized risks, contextualized threat insights, and the organization's app inventory—without setups or integrations. SaaS is a Moving Target SaaS stacks don't stand still. Business critical apps can easily slip into a state of vulnerability (i.e. supply chain attacks, account takeo...

It's no great revelation to say that SaaS applications have changed the way we operate, both in our personal and professional lives. We routinely rely on cloud-based and remote applications to conduct our basic functions, with the result that the only true perimeter of our networks has become the identities with which we log into these services. Unfortunately – as is so often the case – our appetite for better workflows, collaboration, and communications outpaced our willingness to make sure these tools and processes were secure as we hooked them into our environments, handing off our control of the security of our data. Each of these applications asks for various amounts of permissions into our data, which often rely on other vendors' services, creating not a network, but a tangle of interdependent intricacies that has become so complex most security and IT teams don't even know how many SaaS applications are connected in, let alone what they are or their access permissi...

Recent supply chain cyber-attacks are prompting cyber security regulations in the financial sector to tighten compliance requirements, and other industries are expected to follow. Many companies still don't have efficient methods to manage related time-sensitive SaaS security and compliance tasks. Free SaaS risk assessment tools are an easy and practical way to bring visibility and initial control to SaaS sprawl and Shadow AI. These tools now offer incremental upgrades , helping security professionals meet their company budget or maturity level.  Regulatory pressure, SaaS and AI proliferation, and increased risk of breaches or data leaks through 3rd party apps, make SaaS security one of the hottest areas for practitioners to learn and adopt. New regulations will require robust third-party SaaS risk lifecycle management that begins with SaaS service discovery and third-party risk management (TPRM) and ends with the requirement from CISOs to report incidents in their supply ch...

The use of software as a service (SaaS) is experiencing rapid growth and shows no signs of slowing down. Its decentralized and easy-to-use nature is beneficial for increasing employee productivity, but it also poses many security and IT challenges. Keeping track of all the SaaS applications that have been granted access to an organization's data is a difficult task. Understanding the risks that SaaS applications pose is just as important, but it can be challenging to secure what cannot be seen. Many organizations have implemented access management solutions, but these are limited in visibility to only pre-approved applications. The average medium-sized organization has hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of SaaS applications that have been adopted by employees who needed a quick and easy solution or found a free version, completely bypassing IT and security. This leads to a significant risk as many of these applications do not have the necessary security and/or compliance standard...

Shadow IT refers to the practice of users deploying unauthorized technology resources in order to circumvent their IT department. Users may resort to using shadow IT practices when they feel that existing IT policies are too restrictive or get in the way of them being able to do their jobs effectively. An old school phenomenon  Shadow IT is not new. There have been countless examples of widespread shadow IT use over the years. In the early 2000s, for example, many organizations were reluctant to adopt Wi-Fi for fear that it could undermine their security efforts. However, users wanted the convenience of wireless device usage and often deployed wireless access points without the IT department's knowledge or consent. The same thing happened when the iPad first became popular. IT departments largely prohibited iPads from being used with business data because of the inability to apply group policy settings and other security controls to the devices. Even so, users often ignored IT ...

Let's first take a look back at 2020! Adding to the list of difficulties that surfaced last year, 2020 was also grim for personal data protection, as it has marked a new record number of leaked credentials and PI data. A whopping 20 billion records were stolen in a single year, increasing 66% from 12 billion in 2019. Incredibly, this is a 9x increase from the comparatively "small" amount of 2.3 billion records stolen in 2018. This trend seems to fit an exponential curve; even worse, we are yet to see the fallouts from the end of the year "Solorigate" campaign, which has the potential to marginalize even these numbers by the end of 2021. Found among the leaked data are usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, bank account details, healthcare information, and other personal data. Malicious actors utilize these treasure troves of information for fraud and further attacks. In just the first quarter of 2020, the Dutch government managed to lose a hard drive ...