The hidden risk in every app your staff connects to company data
When staff click "Allow" to connect an app, they create a standing trust relationship that can outlast their employment, according to Nudge Security. These connections often bypass standard login security and remain active even after an employee leaves, creating a significant security gap. For IT and security teams, the volume of these grants makes manual review impossible, leaving sensitive data exposed to potential breaches.
When staff click “Allow” to connect an app, they create a standing trust relationship that can outlast their employment, according to Nudge Security. These connections often bypass standard login security and remain active even after an employee leaves, creating a significant security gap. For IT and security teams, the volume of these grants makes manual review impossible, leaving sensitive data exposed to potential breaches.
An average employee creates 88 OAuth grants, with 31 of those carrying data-level permissions that allow access to sensitive files and information, according to Nudge Security. A typical organization has 40 apps with programmatic access to sensitive corporate data, creating thousands of potential entry points for attackers. (Nudge Security)
OAuth grants are a separate protocol from standard user login controls, meaning they don’t automatically inherit your single sign-on or multi-factor authentication settings. Grants issued by third-party apps continue to work uninterrupted even if the employee who created them is disabled or leaves the company.
Gartner predicts that half of SaaS breaches will stem from overprivileged OAuth tokens by 2027. At a 1,000-person company, that translates to 88,000 access paths, with 31,000 of them having a direct line to sensitive data, according to Nudge Security.
Why manual reviews fail
A thorough review of a single OAuth grant involves checking the app’s profile, the grantor’s role, and the requested scopes against your data-sharing policy. BleepingComputer reported that reviewing a single grant can take 45 minutes, making it impossible to keep up with thousands of connections.
Many grants sit dormant for months without producing a single log entry, but they stay fully valid and can be exercised at any time, according to Nudge Security. Attackers know this. In the recent Vercel breach, the root cause was a compromised OAuth token from Context.ai, a third-party AI tool that one employee had connected to their enterprise Google Workspace account months earlier.
Look for tools that provide complete visibility into all app-to-app integrations, including dormant grants that don’t appear in standard activity logs. Use automated risk scoring to identify grants with excessive permissions or connections to vendors with poor security postures. Establish a workflow to revoke high-risk grants automatically, especially during employee offboarding.
Your employees will keep connecting apps to get their work done. That’s not going away, and it shouldn’t. Your job is to make sure every one of those connections is visible, understood, and revoked if the risk outweighs the value, according to Nudge Security.
Sources: BleepingComputer.
