SaaS Alerts’ latest SaaS Application Security Insights (SASI) Report, released today, identifies major opportunities for managed service providers to fill the gaps in cybersecurity for small and medium-sized businesses. SaaS Alerts also unveiled a new partnership with cyber insurance provider FifthWall Solutions, enabling its MSP partners to simplify and expedite the process for their customers of qualifying and obtaining cyber liability insurance.
The 2024 SASI report analyzed SaaS application security records of more than 18,000 SMBs and nearly 2 million end-user accounts last year. While that data shows that brute-force attacks are down, attackers have developed new, more efficient techniques for breaching systems, such as token hijacking, phishing as a service (PhaaS), and IP address localization.
Key Findings
Among the key findings is end users’ continued woeful adoption of multifactor authentication. It’s up just slightly from 32% the previous year to 35% this year. “It’s disappointing,” says Jim Lippie, co-founder and CEO of SaaS Alerts, provider of an automated SaaS security platform. “One of the other key findings was the 7,900 incidents of compromise that were caught using our respond [automated remediation] module,” he adds.
The report also reveals a 75% increase in guest user accounts. Of the 1,928,281 SaaS accounts monitored by SaaS Alerts in 2023, almost half (48.1%) are guest user accounts versus licensed users. Because most guest user accounts are granted the same permissions as internal staff accounts, companies increase their exposure to data breaches and exfiltration.
“Guess accounts certainly are a big deal and we’ve been pointing this out now for multiple years and the problem isn’t getting any better,” Lippie says. “And a lot of times when an MSP will come on our platform, they don’t even understand the totality of the guest user issue.” SaaS Alerts has a tool to automate deletion of guest accounts, but Lippie says “we’re going to get more aggressive with that in our platform,” in Q2. He declined to provide more detail on what that will entail, other than to say it will be about policy.
Lippie recommends MSPs use the latest SASI Report to educate customers. “One of the things I like to really emphasize is that this is a different type of report that most MSPs are not used to seeing in our industry, because it’s an aggregation of real-life data collected from a platform and then anonymized for the benefit of the community,” he explains. “So this is not a survey.”
In addition, SaaS Alerts MSPs partners can utilize the platform’s reporting capabilities to illustrate the value add they offer customers, he says. “Seeing is believing, and if you’re an MSP on SaaS Alerts, you can go to your customer and show them where all the attacks are coming from,” Lippie says.
Cyber Insurance Partnership Aims To Provide Competitive Advantage
Regarding the new partnership with FifthWall Solutions, Lippie calls this a “benefit to the partner community. “I think it just makes them more competitive, and it’s a distinct benefit to their customer base.”
The FifthWall partnership enables SaaA Alerts partners to offer their customers a bundled in, turnkey insurance product developed specifically for the MSP channel. The cyber insurance program for SMBs, called Beltex, offers the flexibility to meet individual SMB requirements and be packaged and underwritten with specific security bundles. When MSPs deploy SaaS Alerts to their customers, they will have access to a customized Beltex link they can send them to verify eligibility. In many cases, the SMB customer will receive a direct quote within minutes and can choose whether or not to purchase the coverage. Beltex manages the entire process from start to finish.
“Once [the SMBs] get into Beltex, if, for whatever reason, there isn’t a good fit we can access literally 96% of the carrier space that provides cyber liability,” says FifthWall Solutions President Reid Wellock. “So we will be able to find the most competitive quote for that business no matter what.”
FifthWall Solutions is a cyber insurance wholesaler and program manager, Wellock explains. “We were the first national wholesaler to dedicate solely to cyber in the country,” he says, adding that “about three years ago we decided we were going to pivot a significant portion of our focus [to] the MSP channel specifically.”
Partnering Trend
SaaS Alerts is the latest cybersecurity vendor to partner with a cyber insurance provider. Kaseya, for instance, announced its Cyber Insurance Fast Track program last May. Through a partnership with Cysurance, MSPs and their customers who use Kaseya’s IT Complete Security Suite are eligible for up to $1.5M in coverage without the complex and lengthy questionnaires at up to 20%–50% discounts from traditional coverage.
Similarly, Sophos partnered with Cysurance last July to provide unique, fixed-price cyber insurance to U.S.-based organizations using Sophos’ Managed Detection and Response (MDR).
Wellock says in addition SaaS Alerts, FifthWall Solutions is also partnering with cybersecurity providers Blumira and Phin.
“What Reid’s team has done around understanding the market and making it really simple for the MSP and their customers is a big point of difference,” Lippie says. In addition, “We have real time data around SAS applications obviously, which is why we’re able to produce something like this report that we’re going to be able to, in the long term, feed Reid and his team and the carriers that underwrite these policies. That level of data will be extremely meaningful down the road when we’re looking to understand trends that will ultimately … be able to reduce the cost of cyber policies.”
