The SaaS that companies already run — that now runs AI. Copilots and chatbots come packaged as features inside platforms that were approved a year ago, agents inside those platforms reach out to MCP servers and other external tools, and under all of it we have the shadow SaaS that people sign up for without telling anyone. Mitiga Field CISO Brian Contos opens by asking how a security team draws a boundary around a surface that keeps moving.
Christian Ghigliotty says you have to start by understanding the estate first. A platform you approved last year may have shipped a feature since that moves data somewhere new, and the only way to have an opinion about that is to know what you have. Security teams face time and budget constraints, so the inventory turns prioritization into a real decision.
From there, the questions are concrete. What is the practice when we review an integration? What happens when someone needs to revoke an access token? What is the blast radius of one compromised integration, and how does it connect to the others? He says most teams across the industry are still building that muscle, and that it depends on partnerships across the business as much as on tooling. The AI evaluations started happening while all that work was still in progress.
On incident response, the evidence has changed shape. Someone steals a token and sits in a SaaS application for a year, and there is no malware to find. Only API logs and session events. He correlates events across the identity provider, the SaaS application, and what happens in between and after. The response might be revoking a token, killing a session, or deactivating an account. Then, how much of that should a machine do without human involvement? It's a bit of an open question. Automation reaches further in SaaS than on an endpoint, because SaaS is API-driven.
The conversation also spends time on soft skills, including an annual review Brian was given thirty years ago that he still quotes back at himself. Take a watch above. You can also catch Mitiga Mic in your podcast feed twice a month at Cybercrime Magazine.
