The blame lies with customer misconfigurations, not flaws in the SaaS platform.

A configuration error in the SaaS platform of an S&P 500 company is leaking data on the internet. News of the misconfiguration mistake found in nearly 70% of ServiceNow instances tested was reported Wednesday by AppOmni, a SaaS security provider.
According to AppOmni, the misconfiguration resulted from a combination of customer-managed configurations and over-provisioning of permissions to guest users. ServiceNow has more than 25,000 customers, most of them with 50 to 200 employees and with revenues in the $1 million to $10 million range.
AppOmni explained in a news release that these types of misconfigurations are common across major SaaS platforms due to the complexity that inevitably comes with high levels of SaaS functionality, flexibility, and extensibility.
โThis type of issue is in no way limited to ServiceNow,โ AppOmni CEO Brendan OโConnor tells CSO. โWe are seeing major data exposures across multiple SaaS platforms,โ he says. โWe have seen an uptick in attacks over the past couple of weeks across multiple SaaS applications.โ
SaaS applications donโt get adequate security scrutiny
Misconfigurations can happen during the initial implementation phase of a SaaS platform, when users or settings change, or as part of the regular cadence of SaaS updates that can impact current configurations, explained AppOmni, which has developed the SaaS Security Analyzer, a free web application that will determine if a ServiceNow instance has this misconfiguration.
OโConnor says his company has been working with ServiceNow to clear up the problem. However, he adds, โWe are strongly advising ServiceNow customers to manually check for this issue themselves.โ
โSaaS applications, in general, donโt get the security scrutiny that they require,โ OโConnor says. โMost customers think that the cloud provider handles everything for them. They donโt understand the shared responsibility model, and what their obligations are in protecting their data and properly configuring and using SaaS.โ
Extreme digital transformation contributes to security problems
OโConnor compared SaaS misconfigurations to past problems with AWS S3 buckets. โItโs not a software flaw in the cloud provider,โ he says. โItโs a common pattern whereby customers, generally unintentionally, expose internal data from their SaaS platform to the external world. What weโre reporting today is that in up to 70% of the cases weโve analyzed, weโre finding this exposure exists without any authentication. You donโt need a password. You donโt need to break into someoneโs computer.โ
OโConnor adds that the extreme digital transformation of companies during the past two years has contributed to security problems at many organizations. โThe pandemic has forced more and more companies to embrace the cloud,โ he says. โThe cloud is secure, but in our rush to migrate to the cloud, there are some security things that organizations have overlooked. I think that organizations may not have had the time to build the right level of security scrutiny into their architecture as they moved into the cloud.โ