CrowdStrike acquires Adaptive Shield to provide comprehensive SaaS security management

At the first Fal.Con Europe CrowdStrike has announced an agreement to acquire Adaptive Shield, a leader in SaaS security. The acquisition will enable CrowdStrike to become the only cybersecurity provider that delivers complete account-based attack protection across today’s cloud ecosystem – from on-premises Active Directory to cloud-based account providers and the growing SaaS space – through a single platform.

With the rapid expansion of organisations’ cloud environments, the need for strong security for hybrid cloud environments has never been greater. SaaS is projected to become the largest cloud computing category in 2024, accounting for more than 40% of all public cloud spending.

Attackers are actively targeting this rapidly growing attack surface, often using identity-based attack techniques. According to CrowdStrike’s Global Threat Report 2024, cloud intrusions increased by 75% last year, and 75% of attacks did not use malware to gain initial access. As SaaS usage continues to grow, the addition of new applications complicates the environment and increases the risk of configuration errors for human and system accounts, opening up new opportunities for cyberattacks.

These factors pose numerous challenges for defenders:

• Ensure full application visibility. Due to the democratisation of IT, application owners from different departments are responsible for managing and securing their applications, which limits visibility into configurations, accounts, and data protection.
• Ensuring the security of a large number of SaaS applications. Organisations can have dozens or hundreds of SaaS applications, each with its own interface, terminology, role-based access control, configurations, and security settings, which requires constant management.
• Identify complex threats based on accounts. Attackers targeting credentials and identities in SaaS applications can gain access to critical business services that store sensitive customer data that often goes unnoticed.
• Protection of human, user, and system accounts. Accounts cover both human users and system objects such as service accounts, API keys, and OAuth authorisations for third-party applications. This requires careful management of authentication, authorisation, and activity monitoring.

Attackers are well aware of these weaknesses and actively exploit them, often hiding in hidden areas between SaaS applications where they are almost impossible to detect.

The main task is to highlight these blind spots. Adaptive Shield offers the most comprehensive security management and protection against threats to accounts, misconfigurations, and data in SaaS applications to prevent SaaS breaches. By integrating Adaptive Shield into the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, it provides state-of-the-art capabilities to prevent account-based attacks in hybrid cloud environments.

Mission to ensure the security of mission-critical SaaS applications

Adaptive Shield provides customers with end-to-end SaaS application security management (SSPM) capabilities. The technology provides complete visibility and management of human and system accounts and their rights, activity levels and open data across more than 150+ mission-critical SaaS applications. Beyond credentials, Adaptive Shield provides visibility into misconfigurations and other risks impacting SaaS applications, enabling organisations to better manage these issues and identify and respond to threats.

This visibility, enabled by agentless deployment, is key to improving SaaS security. Security teams can use the platform to collaborate with application owners and provide recommendations to address security issues. Within three to four months of implementing Adaptive Shield, organisations reported an improvement in SaaS security visibility from 20% to 85% – a 300% increase.

The security of generative AI is also an important component of Adaptive Shield. The growing use of generative AI creates new risks: data leakage, expanding attack surface, and privacy issues. SSPM informs users of security issues in AI-powered applications and provides detailed remediation steps so that application owners and security teams can work together to address them.

The integrated Adaptive Shield technology with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform will provide organisations with a significant advantage: proactively detecting and preventing advanced attacks across multiple domains, including endpoints, cloud, and SaaS applications.

Overview of benefits for customers

• Comprehensive SaaS security management (SSPM). Organisations gain full visibility and control over misconfigurations, access rights, and activity levels for both human and system accounts, as well as public data across more than 150 SaaS applications. This end-to-end visibility into accounts across hybrid cloud environments provides a unique context for rapid cloud threat detection and response (CDR).
• Security control of GenAI applications. Adaptive Shield monitors applications powered by generative AI and helps organisations maintain security standards, detect configuration changes, control AI settings to prevent data leaks, and identify shadow AI applications to restrict access based on their risk profile.
• Unifying hybrid accounts and cloud security. The powerful combination of Adaptive Shield and CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection will provide customers with comprehensive protection for SaaS accounts, on-premises Active Directory and cloud environments (Okta and Microsoft Entra ID). CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security customers will also gain unified visibility and protection across their modern cloud infrastructure.
• Accelerated detection and response. Adaptive Shield’s integration with CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM provides rapid detection and response in real time through threat correlation and automated responses through CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR.

Protect your organisation across endpoints, accounts, and the cloud

CrowdStrike is a pioneer in cloud-based cybersecurity. The acquisition of Adaptive Shield is another step forward, enabling us to provide our customers with maximum protection against modern cyberattacks using the Falcon platform.

Adaptive Shield is an important part of CrowdStrike’s cloud security vision. It provides organisations with granular visibility into their growing cloud environments, enables them to manage and secure their SaaS posture, and helps detect and prevent account-based attacks.

CrowdStrike continues to innovate in the field of cloud security and provide its customers with reliable protection. Earlier this year, the company announced the acquisition of Flow Security, which enables data protection at rest and in transit. More than a year ago, CrowdStrike acquired Bionic, a pioneer in application security posture management that offers the most comprehensive cloud-based application security platform (CNAPP) on the market.

Today’s cloud environments and applications are constantly changing, and so are the attackers who attack them. Businesses need a single solution that delivers the latest cloud security capabilities. Adaptive Shield technology is a perfect complement to CrowdStrike’s solution and prevents SaaS security breaches on the most comprehensive cybersecurity platform available.