Avoiding SaaS Breaches: How Apptega Can Help You Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Posture

The U.S. Treasury Department recently disclosed a major security incident involving SaaS security provider BeyondTrust.  

According to a letter sent from Treasury to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, threat actors compromised an API key within BeyondTrust’s platform that was used for remote technical support to Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users. Using the key, the threat actors were able to access DO workstations and unclassified files, overriding security measures.

The incident highlights the need for more rigorous cybersecurity and compliance posture management, particularly as it relates to third-party risk. According to a 2024 Prevalent study, three in five organizations experienced a third-party data breach or cybersecurity incident from May 2023 to 2024, an increase of 49% year over year.

SaaS provider breaches have made recent headlines and affected business around the globe, serving as a reminder of how one incident can thrust an organization into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

And for the many organizations that depend on SaaS providers for some aspect of their business, having a solid playbook to follow if your vendor is breached should be a priority, but following best practices and ensuring critical controls proves highly effective at heading off such incidents.

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Using Apptega to Fortify Defenses & Minimize Vendor Risk

At Apptega, we’re building a platform that maximizes visibility into internal and third-party risk and helps you strengthen your cybersecurity posture by aligning with compliance frameworks so you can avoid similar incidents.    

Our continuous compliance platform plays a critical role in reducing the complexity of your compliance journey by streamlining processes end to end, from assessments to risk management to audits.  

Apptega’s platform gives you the ability to track, manage, and enforce security best practices and compliance standards to reduce internal and external risk. These best practices include: 

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1. Centralized Risk Management

Identify, assess, and monitor risks across your internal operations and third-party vendors using Apptega as a central hub. Get a single bird’s eye view of your risk so you can score, stack rank, and prioritize based on severity. And leverage our Vendor Risk Manager to automate and centralize your vendor cybersecurity and compliance evaluations.

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2. Policy and Control Alignment‍

Align your company policies with regulatory requirements and industry standards by consolidating controls and mapping them to an extensive library of frameworks in the Apptega platform. Manage all your frameworks as one cohesive program, and enable regular updates, automated monitoring, and one-click reporting to ensure continuous alignment.  

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3. Continuous Risk Assessment‍

Utilize Apptega’s capabilities for ongoing risk assessments and risk heat map tracking to stay ahead of emerging threats. Vendor risk questionnaires can also highlight potential risks to your organization when leveraged within our platform.  Access a library of templates, upload your own, or create customized questionnaires to meet your unique needs, with AI-based recommendations and auto-tasking to easily transform assessment results into remediation plans.

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4. Incident Management Procedures‍

Manage incident response processes and policies in Apptega to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Use our Incident Response Policy Template to help establish your organization’s breach response process.

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5. Regular Training and Awareness‍

Ensure security awareness controls across all relevant frameworks are being met. Use our Security Awareness and Training Policy Template to walk step by step through helping employees understand roles and responsibilities for protecting information systems and personally identifiable information (PII) as well as ensuring the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of data.

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6. Audit and Compliance Automation

‍Automate evidence collection, audits, and reporting to reduce manual work and ensure accuracy, better preparing you for regulatory reviews. Vendor information is readily available in the Apptega platform. Just import auditor requests into the platform, link relevant evidence to the audit, share updates with auditors, assign tasks to team members, and easily track progress with views for both auditors and internal stakeholders.

By embedding these practices into your day-to-day operations, you’ll enhance your ability to prevent breaches, strengthen compliance, and bolster stakeholder trust. The Apptega platform is not just a compliance asset — it should be viewed as a strategic component of your overall cybersecurity defense. 

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