SaaS Breaches Start with Tokens – What Security Teams Must Watch

Steven

SaaS Breaches Start with Tokens – What Security Teams Must Watch

Summary

Token theft — OAuth access tokens, API keys and session tokens — has emerged as a primary vector for SaaS breaches in 2025. Attackers who obtain a valid token can move laterally across integrations and access data without re-challenging MFA or passwords. Recent incidents (Slack, CircleCI, Cloudflare/Okta and the large 2025 Salesloft/Drift supply‑chain breach) show how a single forgotten or long‑lived token can defeat otherwise robust defences.

Organisations face token blind spots due to SaaS sprawl: many apps, unsanctioned integrations and service identities that traditional identity controls and legacy tools typically don’t monitor. The article outlines why legacy security misses the problem, the emergence of dynamic SaaS security platforms, and a practical token hygiene checklist security teams can adopt immediately.

Key Points

  1. Tokens (OAuth, API keys, session tokens) act as persistent keys — if stolen, they can bypass SSO and MFA protections.
  2. High‑profile breaches (Slack, CircleCI, Cloudflare/Okta, Salesloft/Drift) illustrate real-world token abuse and lateral movement across SaaS environments.
  3. SaaS sprawl creates vast numbers of non‑human identities and app‑to‑app trust relationships that are often invisible to IT and security teams.
  4. Legacy controls (SSO, MFA, CASBs) protect user logins but frequently overlook app‑to‑app tokens and their activity.
  5. Dynamic SaaS security platforms aim to discover, map and enforce policy on third‑party integrations and token usage to restore visibility and control.
  6. Practical token hygiene steps — inventory, approval workflows, least‑privilege, rotation, monitoring and offboarding — materially reduce risk.

Context and Relevance

This is highly relevant for security, cloud and IT teams managing modern SaaS estates. As enterprises use hundreds of cloud apps, the attack surface shifts from user logins to inter‑app trust relationships. The article ties into broader trends: increasing supply‑chain attacks, growth of SaaS sprawl, and the rising need for specialised tooling to map and police tokens. Teams responsible for IAM, cloud security and incident response should treat token hygiene as a first‑class concern.

Author style

Punchy and direct: the piece makes a clear, urgent case that token mismanagement is an existential SaaS security issue. If you oversee SaaS, identity or incident response, the checklist and examples are worth a close read — they point to immediate, practical actions.

Why should I read this?

Because this is the short, ugly truth: one token can wreck your week. If you don’t know where your integrations and tokens live, attackers already have a map. Read it for the real breach stories, the simple hygiene checklist and the no‑nonsense reasons why your SSO+MFA setup isn’t enough on its own.

Token hygiene checklist (at a glance)

  1. Keep an up‑to‑date inventory of OAuth apps, API keys and service identities.
  2. Require admin approval or security review before granting app authorisations.
  3. Enforce least‑privilege scopes for tokens — avoid broad, long‑lived permissions.
  4. Rotate or expiry tokens regularly to shrink an attacker’s window.
  5. Revoke unused or dormant tokens and alert on anomalous token activity.
  6. Include token revocation in user offboarding and app decommissioning processes.

Source

Source: https://thehackernews.com/2025/10/saas-breaches-start-with-tokens-what.html