By Sam Morrison, Product Manager – Threat Detection, AppOmni
with Joe Sullivan, CEO of Joe Sullivan Security, former CSO of Meta, Uber & Cloudflare

Over the past six months, a coordinated wave of data-theft and extortion attacks has targeted organizations through their cloud CRM environments—most prominently Salesforce. These intrusions typically leveraged social engineering (often vishing) to trick users into authorizing rogue connected apps or granting OAuth access, enabling large-scale export of customer records.

Industry analyses describe a common playbook—voice-phishing support staff or users, prompting them to authorize a malicious Data Loader-style app or similar OAuth client—then exfiltrating CRM objects at scale. 

Unfortunately this campaign is not isolated. This is one of many common SaaS targeted attacks that are currently being leveraged successfully across all sizes and types of organizations. 

Ideally, organizations would have an SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management) and SaaS Threat Detection control layer in place before an incident. Whether the suspected incident is a CRM-focused attack, or any other SaaS targeted campaign, deploying AppOmni during forensics is still a best practice—helping you quickly understand what happened, contain the threat, and harden your environment.

How AppOmni enhances post-incident forensics

1. Hassle free log normalization: AppOmni ingests and normalizes logs across different SaaS applications to be triaged & investigated either within AppOmni or your SIEM of choice. 
2. Rapid discovery of risky or unauthorized connected apps: AppOmni automatically enumerates all connected apps, scopes, and token grants, allowing responders to quickly identify suspicious clients (such as those with data-export scopes recently approved).
3. Containment and monitoring: Security teams can identify malicious app tokens, high-risk integrations, and put in place highly targeted detection rules to alert when further malicious activity occurs.
4. Hardening during investigation: AppOmni enables application owners and security teams to work in the same direction by continuously monitoring posture state and prioritizing remediation of any additional potentially exploited misconfigurations.
5. Cross-SaaS pivot detection: Leverage AppOmni’s centralized Identity service to monitor for activity within other SaaS applications, investigate lateral movement, and identify where to retract privileges.
   

While the telemetry SaaS platforms individually provide can be valuable, they often lack the integrated, real-time correlation needed during a live incident. AppOmni closes those gaps while shortening time-to-facts, tightening containment, and hardening SaaS perimeters.

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts on how to use AppOmni’s Threat Detection to address specific Incident Response situations.

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