Marketing and Sales
Marketing and Sales systems, in the context of cybersecurity, are critical because they handle vast amounts of customer and prospect data (names, emails, preferences, behavioral data) and manage the channels used for external communication (email, social media, web forms). Cybersecurity efforts here focus on protecting this sensitive customer data, maintaining the reputation of the communication channels, and preventing systems from being used for fraud or spam.
Marketing Automation
This category includes software platforms used to automate repetitive marketing tasks, such as email campaigns, social media posting, lead scoring, and customer relationship management integration.
Examples: HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, automated email sequencing tools.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Reputation Integrity and Data Confidentiality. The focus is on preventing the marketing platform from being compromised and used to distribute malicious content and securing the massive customer database.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Email Deliverability Compromise: If an attacker gains control of the marketing automation platform, they can use the organization's trusted email domain to send massive amounts of phishing emails or spam, quickly destroying the domain's reputation and getting it blacklisted.
Web Form Exploitation: Public web forms (e.g., newsletter sign-ups, demo requests) are often targets for bots and attackers who use them to inject malicious scripts, launch spam campaigns, or overwhelm the underlying database.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) in Landing Pages: Vulnerabilities in the platform's landing page or website builder allow attackers to inject malicious code that executes in a prospect's browser, leading to session hijacking or credential theft.
Database Exposure: Misconfiguration of the marketing database (which holds highly detailed customer profiles and lead scores) leading to accidental public exposure or theft of PII.
Sales Engagement
This category encompasses tools and practices used by the sales force to interact with prospects, manage their pipeline, track activities, and automate outreach sequences.
Examples: Sales Engagement Platforms (SEP) (e.g., Salesloft, Outreach), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) front-ends (e.g., Salesforce Sales Cloud), and sales analytics tools.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Identity Protection and Data Access Control. The focus is on securing the sales professionals' accounts, which often have high levels of access to sensitive customer data and critical internal systems.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Account Takeover (ATO): An attacker compromises a sales representative's account, which they then use to send highly targeted, personalized phishing emails to customers or prospects, often requesting fraudulent payments or credentials.
API and Integration Vulnerabilities: Sales platforms often integrate tightly with internal systems (like CRMs or Financial Software). A flaw in the integration's API can be exploited to gain unauthorized access to internal customer databases.
Data Exfiltration by Insider Threats: Sales personnel have legitimate access to valuable customer and pricing lists. An insider threat or a compromised account can easily export and exfiltrate this sensitive data for competitive purposes.
Unsecured Public Assets: Exposure of sensitive sales assets, such as private sales training documents, price lists, or confidential pitches, on public-facing cloud storage or shared links.
ThreatNG provides crucial external visibility to secure Marketing & Sales systems by identifying exposed assets, leaked credentials, and domain weaknesses that attackers use to compromise customer data, launch phishing campaigns, or damage brand reputation. It acts as an early warning system for the attack surface that enables Marketing Automation and Sales Engagement.
ThreatNG’s External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to map the public-facing components of the Marketing and Sales attack surface, which often includes third-party SaaS platforms and customer-facing portals.
Technology Stack Discovery: ThreatNG explicitly identifies technologies critical to this sector, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation software. This directly addresses the need to secure the platforms that handle vast customer data.
Continuous Monitoring: Marketing campaigns and sales outreach are constant, requiring continuous security oversight. ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of all domains and subdomains. Suppose a temporary landing page or an API endpoint for a Marketing Automation campaign is accidentally exposed. In that case, ThreatNG detects the configuration change immediately, preventing sustained exposure that could lead to Database Exposure.
Code Secret Exposure Discovery: This is vital for securing custom Sales Engagement portals and integration APIs. ThreatNG investigates public code repositories for hard-coded sensitive data.
Example: ThreatNG finds a public code repository containing a valid, non-expired API Key for a Sales Engagement Platform integration with the CRM. This is a direct path to API and Integration Vulnerabilities exploitation, which ThreatNG proactively flags.
External Assessment Capabilities
ThreatNG’s External Assessment assigns scores that quantify the external risk of data compromise and identity theft against marketing and sales resources.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This is the most critical score for the Marketing Automation category, as it measures the resilience against attacks that exploit email infrastructure. It uses Domain Intelligence to check email authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
Example: A weak or absent DMARC policy allows an attacker to easily spoof the organization's domain name, leading to Email Deliverability Compromise and giving rise to phishing campaigns targeting prospects with fake Sales Engagement messages. ThreatNG identifies and quantifies this vulnerability.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This score is derived from Cloud and SaaS Exposure and Dark Web Presence and addresses the core risk of Database Exposure.
Example: A high score flags that administrative credentials for the organization's Marketing Automation platform or the underlying CRM database have been found in DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials). This is a direct precursor to an Account Takeover (ATO) of a sales rep's account.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: This assesses the security of customer-facing web assets.
Example: The assessment detects a vulnerability on a Marketing Automation landing page or form submission page that is susceptible to Web Form Exploitation or Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). This allows attackers to inject malicious code to steal visitor data or spam the database.
Investigation Modules and Technology Identification
ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules provide the granular evidence needed to track and remediate specific security weaknesses in the Marketing and Sales tech stack.
Technology Identification: This identifies specific Marketing and Sales software in use externally.
Example: ThreatNG identifies the external presence of a specific Marketing Automation vendor's tracking script or a CRM login portal. This allows the security team to correlate these public assets with vulnerabilities in the DarCache Vulnerability repository, ensuring that public-facing tools are patched against known exploits.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module searches for inadvertently indexed data that could compromise sales strategy.
Example: The module finds that a search engine has indexed a development folder containing internal Sales Engagement documents, such as private price lists, commission structures, or confidential pitches. This finding addresses the risk of Unsecured Public Assets.
Archived Web Pages: This feature helps secure forgotten marketing or sales portals.
Example: ThreatNG discovers an archived login page for a legacy Marketing Automation campaign server that is still live but running outdated software, creating an easy, unmonitored entry point for data theft.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
The Intelligence Repositories inject crucial real-world threat context regarding credentials and targeted attacks against customer data.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): This directly addresses the risk of Account Takeover (ATO). It alerts the organization if sales or marketing team credentials (especially those with high access to the CRM) are found on the Dark Web, enabling an immediate forced password reset to prevent Data Exfiltration by Insider Threats.
DarCache Vulnerability (NVD, EPSS, KEV, eXploit): This ensures that remediation efforts focus on the most critical risks to the customer data platforms.
Example: A vulnerability in a specific component used by the Marketing Automation platform is found to have a high EPSS score (likelihood of exploitation) in DarCache. This prioritization ensures the organization fixes the flaw that attackers are most likely to use to gain access.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external focus creates powerful synergies when combined with internal security and platform tools:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Marketing Automation Platforms: ThreatNG’s DarCache Rupture findings are the perfect input for CRM security. When a sales or marketing user's credentials are leaked, this intelligence is used to instantly revoke their API tokens and enforce an organization-wide password rotation for CRM access, preventing Account Takeover.
Web Application Firewalls (WAF) & Content Delivery Networks (CDN): ThreatNG’s detailed Web Application Hijack Susceptibility assessment for public landing pages provides actionable intelligence. This intelligence can be delivered to the WAF to tune security rules and automatically block traffic patterns associated with Web Form Exploitation attempts, protecting the integrity of the marketing database.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): When ThreatNG detects a critical event, such as a highly susceptible domain or a mass credential leak, this intelligence is used to trigger an automated workflow in a SOAR system. The workflow can automatically lock the compromised sales account, notify the Marketing Automation platform administrator, and create a high-priority ticket to investigate the potential for Data Exfiltration by Insider Threats.
