Shining a Light on Shadow Apps: The Invisible Gateway to SaaS Data Breaches
Sep 10, 2024SaaS Security / Risk Management
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 their interac