Threat Prevention & Detection in SaaS Environments - 101

Executive summary: This contributed article highlights identity-based threats as a primary attack vector for SaaS applications—phishing, stolen credentials, over‑provisioned and non‑human accounts—and explains how Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) detects behavioral anomalies across the SaaS stack. It references real incidents (including a large Snowflake data exfiltration) as examples and emphasizes mitigations such as MFA, SSO, least privilege, permission trimming, deprovisioning dormant and external accounts, and monitoring privileged activity.