Shadow IT refers to technology tools, software, and services used within an organization without explicit IT department approval. Articles under this tag examine how shadow IT emerges, its impact on security posture, and strategies for detecting and managing unauthorized technology use across your workforce.
posts
Your Employees Are Building a Second Network You Can't See A marketing manager signs up for an AI writing tool using her corporate email. A developer spins up an AWS instance on a personal account to test code faster. A sales rep stores client contracts in a personal
In January 2025, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an emergency directive after threat actors exploited misconfigured SaaS environments across multiple federal agencies. The attackers didn't need sophisticated zero-day exploits. They walked in through overprivileged service accounts, dormant API tokens, and single-factor authentication — problems that every
The Personal Phone That Took Down a Hospital Network In 2023, a nurse at a regional hospital plugged her personal phone into a workstation USB port to charge it. That phone carried malware picked up from a third-party app store. Within 72 hours, ransomware had encrypted patient records across three
The Salesforce Instance Nobody Knew About In 2022, a mid-size healthcare company discovered that one of its marketing teams had been running an entirely separate Salesforce instance — for eleven months. Patient-adjacent data sat in an environment with no encryption at rest, no access controls, and no logging. The IT security
The Breach That Started With a Single SaaS Login In January 2023, Mailchimp disclosed its second major breach in less than a year. The cause? A threat actor used social engineering to trick an employee into handing over credentials to an internal tool. That single compromised SaaS login exposed 133
In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that a threat actor had stolen data on 37 million customer accounts — and the intrusion reportedly exploited an API accessible from systems that included employee-used devices. It wasn't a sophisticated zero-day. It was a gap in how endpoints and access were managed. If
A Single Employee's Phone Just Cost This Company Everything In August 2021, T-Mobile confirmed a massive data breach affecting over 50 million people. While the full attack chain was complex, the reality is that personal devices connecting to corporate environments create attack surfaces that most IT teams drastically
The Breach That Started With a Spreadsheet App In 2023, a midsize healthcare company discovered that an employee had been syncing patient records to an unauthorized cloud storage service for over eight months. The service had no encryption, no access controls, and no audit logging. By the time the security
The SaaS Sprawl Nobody's Watching In 2023, a single misconfigured Salesforce Community site exposed sensitive health records from a government agency in Vermont. The data was public for months before anyone noticed. The application wasn't hacked in any traditional sense — it was simply left open because
The Personal Phone That Took Down a Hospital Network In 2023, a nurse at a mid-sized hospital plugged a personal phone into a workstation USB port to charge it. That phone was already compromised with malware from a sideloaded app. Within 72 hours, threat actors had lateral movement across the
