Communication and Collaboration Platform
A Communication and Collaboration Platform is an integrated software system designed to centralize and facilitate interaction, coordination, and shared work among individuals and teams, regardless of their geographic location. These platforms are foundational to the modern digital workplace, enabling efficiency, supporting agile project management, and ensuring that distributed employees can access information and resources collectively.
These platforms move organizational work away from disparate applications and physical meetings toward a unified, digital, and often cloud-based environment that supports both synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous (delayed) interaction.
The category encompasses several core types of functionalities, all aimed at improving collective output:
Real-time Messaging and Chat: Provides immediate, persistent text-based conversations, often organized into channels or groups focused on specific projects, teams, or topics. This functionality aims to reduce reliance on email for quick decision-making and daily interactions.
Video and Voice Conferencing: Supports scheduled or on-demand virtual meetings, screen sharing, and recording, facilitating rich, interactive communication necessary for complex discussions or remote training.
Content Creation and Document Sharing: Enables users to co-author, store, and manage files (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, presentations) in a central, cloud-based repository. Key features include real-time simultaneous editing, version control, and granular access controls.
Project and Task Management: Provides tools for planning, assigning, tracking, and visualizing workflows, often integrated directly within the communication interface to keep tasks linked to their relevant discussions.
Internal Portals (Intranets): Function as a central organizational hub for sharing company news, policies, employee directories, and general resources, acting as the digital workplace homepage.
The defining characteristic of these platforms is their capacity for shared access and seamless, context-rich interaction, making collective productivity easier than individual work.
Cybersecurity Concerns for SaaS Communication and Collaboration Platforms
When Communication and Collaboration Platforms are delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), they pose unique and severe cybersecurity risks. These risks stem primarily from the platform's need for open sharing and the immense concentration of highly sensitive, proprietary, and personal data that passes through its channels.
1. Pervasive Data Leakage and Loss of Control
The core mechanism of these tools—easy sharing—is their most significant security weakness.
Uncontrolled External Sharing: Employees frequently share sensitive files, confidential financial forecasts, or proprietary intellectual property with external partners or clients via simple, perpetual sharing links. Without strict controls, these links can remain active indefinitely and are often discoverable, leading to massive Data Loss that bypasses traditional network firewalls.
Data Sprawl in Persistent Chat: Real-time chat history provides an incredibly rich, persistent, and searchable repository of internal information. This includes informal discussions containing sensitive information (e.g., passwords shared for troubleshooting, merger planning, or security response details). An attacker who breaches this environment gains deep insight into the organization's confidentiality.
Retention and Compliance Risk: The ongoing creation and storage of documents and chat logs result in data sprawl. If the organization fails to enforce proper data retention policies, years of sensitive historical data are exposed to unnecessary risk, complicating compliance with regulations like GDPR or CCPA.
2. Identity and Access Management (IAM) Flaws and Account Takeover (ATO)
Access to a collaboration suite is an attacker's gateway to the organization's collective internal knowledge and trusted communication channels.
Credential Theft and Impersonation: A successful ATO of an employee's account grants the attacker access to their email, private documents, and team chat history. Attackers can then impersonate the employee to launch sophisticated, trusted internal phishing attacks, authorize fraudulent payments, or initiate wire transfers, leveraging the high trust inherent in these communication systems.
Excessive Default Permissions: Many collaboration tools prioritize ease of use, granting broad default permissions (e.g., "all team members can edit") to large shared folders rather than adhering to the Principle of Least Privilege. If a low-level account is compromised, the attacker can still access and potentially exfiltrate or destroy massive amounts of sensitive, collective data.
3. Third-Party and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
These platforms rely heavily on vendor integrations and the vendor's security posture.
Vulnerable Third-Party Apps: Collaboration tools encourage the use of thousands of small, specialized third-party apps (e.g., workflow bots, project trackers) that integrate with the main suite. Each integration requires permission, often granting broad read or write access. A single, vulnerable, or malicious third-party app can compromise the security of the entire collaboration environment, providing an attacker with a trusted vector into the system.
API and Connector Security: The platform constantly exchanges data with adjacent systems (like CRM or ERP) via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). A vulnerability in an API connector, or the exposure of an API key, can allow an attacker to pivot from the communication platform to the organization's more sensitive data stores, facilitating both data theft and manipulation.
ThreatNG functions as a comprehensive External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP) platform, providing an indispensable, non-intrusive, "outside-in" view of an organization's security posture. This approach is ideally suited to securing modern Communication and Collaboration Platforms, especially their SaaS form factor, because it focuses on the internet-exposed attack surfaces that attackers see and attempt to exploit, directly addressing the core concerns of pervasive data leakage, IAM flaws, and third-party risks.
ThreatNG’s Role in Securing SaaS Collaboration Platforms
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
These foundational capabilities are paramount for defeating the core problem of Shadow IT and maintaining a complete, current inventory of the assets that facilitate collaboration.
External Discovery systematically maps and inventories the organization’s entire digital footprint, including all associated domains, subdomains, and the full range of technologies running on them. This process goes beyond known assets to find resources adopted by employees without central IT knowledge.
Continuous Monitoring ensures this complete inventory is checked vigilantly and automatically, providing real-time alerts on any changes, additions, or shifts in the security posture of an exposed collaboration asset.
ThreatNG Helping Example: A marketing team begins using a vanity URL (e.g.,
brand.link.io) for a new, unvetted file transfer and sharing service to distribute significant video assets externally. External Discovery identifies this previously unknown domain and its associated SaaS vendor. Continuous Monitoring then flags the asset as an unapproved service, immediately alerting the security team to the existence of this Shadow IT collaboration tool before sensitive corporate data is stored and exposed within it.
External Assessment (Cloud and SaaS Exposure Investigation Modules)
ThreatNG’s external assessment provides crucial risk quantification and the identification of security flaws from an attacker’s perspective, enabling the organization to fix exposures before they are exploited proactively.
Cloud Capability (Externally Discovering Cloud Environments and Uncovering Exposed Open Cloud Buckets)
This function directly mitigates the risk of catastrophic data leakage from cloud misconfigured file storage associated with collaboration projects.
Highlight and Detailed Example: Many collaboration tools store or archive data in public cloud storage (such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage) for large-scale file sharing or backup. ThreatNG’s cloud capability scans the internet to find these externally accessible resources belonging to the organization.
Example: During a migration project, an employee creates an Amazon S3 bucket for their department to share archived internal policies and customer documents. ThreatNG discovers this exposed cloud bucket through external probing and assesses that the bucket policy is incorrectly configured to allow "authenticated users" to list the contents, or, worse, is entirely publicly readable. This finding prevents a Pervasive Data Leakage event in which an attacker could otherwise access years of sensitive corporate and customer information by simply guessing the bucket name or finding a public link.
SaaS Identification Capability (SaaSqwatch)
SaaSqwatch is specifically designed to discover and quantify the risk posed by the hundreds of SaaS applications an organization might unknowingly use, directly addressing Third-Party and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities.
Highlight and Detailed Example: SaaSqwatch works from the outside to identify and uncover all SaaS applications associated with the organization’s digital footprint, including sanctioned, unsanctioned, and even deceptive "SaaSquatting" look-alike sites.
Example: A team member uses a popular, but unapproved, online whiteboard and diagramming application for collaborative design sessions. SaSqwatch identifies the company-branded sign-in page for this tool as a new, unsanctioned application. The External Assessment then reveals that the sign-in page is running an outdated component of the underlying web server software. ThreatNG flags the asset as a critical security risk because a known vulnerability exists in that component, providing a direct, exploitable path for an attacker to compromise the organization's network by targeting this previously unknown Shadow IT point.
Investigation Modules
The investigation modules provide context and actionable intelligence on active threats relevant to the security concerns of collaboration platforms, such as Account Takeover.
Highlight and Detailed Example (Investigation Modules): These modules connect external exposure to real-world threats by scanning places like the Dark Web and public code repositories.
Example: The Dark Web Investigation Module discovers a large data dump of stolen credentials, including numerous email addresses and their corresponding passwords for the organization's employees. By correlating these with the domain of the corporate chat platform, the module confirms a high risk of immediate Account Takeover (ATO) for those users. This intelligence allows the security team to preemptively invalidate all session tokens and force immediate password resets for those accounts, blocking attackers from using compromised credentials to impersonate employees within the trusted collaboration environment.
Reporting
ThreatNG transforms raw discovery and assessment data into actionable security intelligence, prioritized for effective remediation.
ThreatNG Helping Example: Following a comprehensive external scan, the Reporting module generates a concise report that prioritizes risks not only by technical severity (e.g., a critical CVE), but also by business impact. The report might prioritize a medium-severity misconfiguration of the primary document-sharing platform over a high-severity vulnerability on a legacy marketing subdomain, because the collaboration platform stores the organization’s most sensitive data. This prioritization ensures that limited security resources are focused on exposures that pose the greatest threat to the continuity and confidentiality of communication and collaboration.
Intelligence Repositories
These repositories house a continuously updated, central collection of threat data, vulnerabilities, and exploitation techniques, providing necessary context for assessment findings.
ThreatNG Helping Example: ThreatNG's Intelligence Repositories identify that the video conferencing platform used by the executive team is currently a popular target for a newly discovered denial-of-service vulnerability. When the Continuous Monitoring module detects that the organization’s public video portal is running a known vulnerable version, the Intelligence Repositories instantly correlate the finding with active exploitation trends, providing the security team with the immediate, real-world context needed to justify an emergency patch or configuration change.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG’s external discovery and risk intelligence seamlessly integrate with existing security tools, enabling automation and enforcement to protect collaboration platforms.
Cooperation with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Systems: ThreatNG identifies a new, externally exposed cloud storage service that an employee is using to upload large, shared files, in violation of the company’s data security policy against transferring files containing personally identifiable information (PII) to unapproved services. ThreatNG provides the domain, IP, and risk score for this unsanctioned service to the organization’s DLP system. The DLP system then uses this external intelligence to immediately enforce security policy by blocking all internal network traffic attempting to upload data to that specific external domain, mitigating the risk of Uncontrolled External Sharing.
Cooperation with Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems: ThreatNG’s Dark Web Investigation discovers a credential pair for an employee that includes their username and password for the corporate Single Sign-On (SSO) system, indicating a high risk of Account Takeover. ThreatNG automatically pushes this compromised credential pair to the organization's IAM system. The IAM system uses this input to add the credential pair to its blocklist instantly, invalidate the user’s current session across all collaboration platforms, and trigger an automated mandatory multi-factor authentication enrollment for that user, neutralizing the threat before an attacker can access the chat or shared documents.
