Top SaaS Cybersecurity Threats in 2023: Are You Ready?

Jan 09, 2023The Hacker NewsWeb Security / SaaS Security

Cybercriminals will be as busy as ever this year. Stay safe and
protect your systems and data by focusing on these 4 key areas to
secure your environment and ensure success in 2023, and make sure
your business is only in the headlines when you WANT it to be.

1 — Web application weaknesses

Web applications are at the core of what SaaS companies do and
how they operate, and they can store some of your most sensitive
information such as valuable customer data.

SaaS applications are often multi-tenanted, so your applications
need to be secure against attacks where one customer could access
the data of another customer, such as logic flaws, injection flaws,
or access control weaknesses. These are easy to exploit by hackers,
and easy mistakes to make when writing code.

Security testing with an automated vulnerability scanner in
combination with regular pentesting can help you design and build
secure web applications by integrating with your existing
environment, catching vulnerabilities as they’re introduced
throughout the development cycle.

2 — Misconfiguration mistakes

Cloud environments can be complicated. Your CTO or DevOps
engineers are responsible for securing every setting, user role and
permission to ensure they comply with industry and company policy.
Misconfigurations can therefore be extremely difficult to detect
and manually remediate. According to Gartner, these cause 80% of all data security breaches^[1], and until 2025, up to
99% of cloud environment failures will be
attributed to human errors^[2].

To mitigate the risk, external network monitoring is a must,
while a pentest of your cloud infrastructure will reveal issues
including misconfigured S3 buckets, permissive firewalls within
VPCs, and overly permissive cloud accounts.

You can audit it yourself with a manual review in combination
with a tool like Scoutsuite, but a vulnerability scanner like
Intruder^[3]
can help reduce and monitor your attack surface too by making sure
only the services that need to be exposed to the internet are
accessible.

3 — Vulnerable software and patching

This may sound obvious, but it’s still a big issue that applies
to everyone and every business. SaaS companies are no exception. If
you’re self-hosting an application, you need to ensure that the
operating system and library security patches are applied as they
are released. This unfortunately is an on-going process, as
security vulnerabilities in operating systems and libraries are
constantly being found and fixed.

Using DevOps practices and ephemeral infrastructure can help
ensure that your service is always deployed to a fully patched
system on each release, but you also need to monitor for any new
weaknesses that might be discovered in between releases.

An alternative to self-hosting is free (and paid) Serverless and
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings that run your application in
a container, which take care of patching of the operating system
for you. However, you still need to ensure that the libraries used
by your service are kept up to date with security patches.

4 — Weak internal security policies and practices

Many SaaS companies are small and growing, and their security
posture can be poor – but hackers don’t discriminate, leaving SaaS
businesses especially exposed to attack. A few simple measures such
as using a password manager, enabling two-factor authentication and
security training can significantly increase your protection.

Cost effective and easy to implement, a password manager will
help you maintain secure, unique passwords across all the online
services you and your team uses. Make sure everyone in your team
uses one – preferably one that isn’t the subject of frequent
breaches itself…

Enable two-factor or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA)
wherever you can. 2FA requires a second authentication token on top
of the correct password. This could be a hardware security key
(most secure), a time-based One Time Password (moderately secure)
or a One Time Password sent to a mobile device (least secure). Not
all services support 2FA, but where it is supported, it should be
enabled.

Finally, make sure your team understand how to maintain good
cyber hygiene, especially how to recognise and avoid clicking
phishing links.

Conclusion

Ultimately cybersecurity is a balance of risk versus resources,
and it’s a fine line that needs to be walked, especially for
start-ups with a thousand competing priorities. But as your
business scales, team expands and revenue grows, you need to ramp
up your investment in cyber security accordingly.

There are many security specialists that can help you stay
secure and discover weaknesses in your systems. Intruder^[4]
is one of them. We help thousands of small companies stay safe
every day.

Intruder offers penetration testing and vulnerability scanning
to reduce your attack surface and safeguard your systems from these
threats. Its continuous scanning will help you keep on top of the
latest vulnerabilities and alert you to any emerging threats which
could impact any exposed systems. To find out more about Intruder’s
vulnerability scanning, get in touch, or try it free for 14 days today.^[5]