Why Salesforce Cyber Security Matters

The Threat of Cyber Attacks

Cyberattacks are becoming more and more common as individuals and businesses are increasingly targeted. Cybercrime has increased by 600% in the past two years due to the pandemic, and nearly every industry has been affected. The dangers of these attacks are wide-ranging, from the loss of sensitive data to the crippling of critical infrastructure. Cyberattacks can also have a significant financial impact, causing billions of dollars in yearly damages. In 2020, the average cost of a data breach was $3.86 million, and millions of bank details, passwords, and personal information have been compromised.

CRM platforms, like Salesforce, contain millions of verified and high-quality data like customer details, business information, financial details, supply chain details, and others. This makes them a magnet for hackers and disgruntled customers. When your business data is hacked and the content is leaked to the public, consumer trust is eroded, and millions in costs and revenues are lost.

The Harsh Truth of Salesforce Data Security

With more than 3,000 apps that allow users to customize their Salesforce environment fully, the Salesforce digital supply chain is prone to a lot of security risks. Every app you add exposes your organization to digital supply chain attacks. Our whitepaper, detailing the anatomy of a Salesforce supply chain attack, will help you understand the risks involved and what you can do to mitigate them.

As a CRM platform, Salesforce accepts data from external sources, which could be content-borne threat vectors. It has Chatter, a real-time collaboration application that allows users to share information with external parties who can send the content directly to the Salesforce database.

Salesforce also allows businesses to set up the “Email-to-Case” functionality, which creates tickets from customer emails. The platform also supports web forms that can be integrated into the clients’ websites. Information captured by these web forms is directly uploaded to the database.

Salesforce is not an internal-only application. It relies on external actors to supply data to the system, opening the door for malicious actors to infiltrate it. It integrates with other third-party applications through a simple Rest API integration, allowing external systems to feed data to your Salesforce database directly.

How to Mitigate Security Breaches in Salesforce

Salesforce understands the impact of a data breach on its customers and has taken measures to improve Salesforce data security. You can do the following to protect your data:

Take advantage of Salesforce’s native security.

Salesforce provides security tools that can help you reduce the risk and minimize exposure to cyber threats. Check if your Salesforce environment is up-to-date and properly configured with Salesforce Health Check. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent unauthorized access through compromised user accounts.

Encrypt, backup and track your data.

Consider using Salesforce Shield or other solutions that would allow to encrypt and monitor access to sensitive data within your Salesforce environment. It is also recommended to make regular backups of your data stored in Salesforce.

Invest in advanced security protection.

An advanced security protection software is designed exclusively for Salesforce and provides real-time protection from malicious threats. It has advanced detection techniques that stop any content-borne security risk from infiltrating a Salesforce database and causing harm. It can detect buried threats, identify unknown malware, and provide protection from persistent threats.  Some features include static analysis, threat intelligence, anti-evasion algorithms, machine learning, and dynamic real-time scans. Every business that’s serious about data protection should invest in an advanced cloud security solution.

Conclusion

Protect Your Business Using WithSecure

WithSecure has helped thousands of businesses and millions of customers to stay protected against security threats. Together with Salesforce, we have designed WithSecure Cloud Protection for Salesforce, an advanced cloud security protection solution that prevents attacks from content uploaded by external parties. Our software provides real-time scanning to detect viruses, Trojans, ransomware, and other advanced malware. Use it together with native Salesforce data security capabilities, and you can have peace of mind that you and your customer’s data are protected from third-party threats.