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The “Zombie” SaaS Audit: Finding the 3 Apps Your Former Employees Still Access

The Zombie Account SaaS Audit: Finding the 3 Apps Your Former Employees Still Access

Someone leaves the company on a Friday. By Monday, their email account is disabled, and their laptop is back in the pile.

What nobody checks is their login to the project management tool they signed up for in Q3, the cloud storage folder they shared with a contractor, or the CRM access they still have from two roles ago.

Three months later, those sessions are still active.

This is how zombie accounts form. nNot through negligence, but through an offboarding process built around corporate IT assets that no longer reflects how people actually use software.

The average company now runs more than 100 SaaS applications. Most offboarding checklists were written when there were three.

What a Zombie Account Actually Is

A zombie account is an active login that belongs to someone who no longer works for you. The name is informal. The risk is not.

What makes zombie accounts particularly dangerous is that they are valid credentials.

There is nothing to detect. The access was granted intentionally, and the system has no reason to question it. If a former employee walks back in through that door, or if their credentials are compromised after they leave, the access is there waiting.

Industry research finds that 50% of organisations have discovered former employees still accessing SaaS applications months after their departure date.

For most of those organisations, the discovery was accidental rather than the result of a deliberate audit.

Stop the Bleeding: How Revoking Admin Rights Eliminates Support Tickets

Stop the Bleeding: How Revoking Admin Rights Eliminates Support Requests

The most time-consuming ticket in your queue is rarely a hardware failure. It’s the PC infection that started when a user installed something they shouldn’t have been able to. Or it’s the broken configuration left behind after someone changed a setting IT can’t trace.

Local administrator rights (the ability to install software, modify system settings, and override security controls) are given to end users far more often than the risk warrants.

The usual reason is efficiency.

The practical result is the opposite. Machines that drift from baseline, infections that spread before they are caught, and remediation requests nobody planned for. Revoking local admin rights directly removes the root cause of most of those requests.

Is Your Invoice a Deepfake? Securing Your Accounts Payable Process Against Voice and Email Cloning

It’s a statistic that sends a shiver down the backs of SME owners, managers and employees.

According to the Australian Federal Police report, business email compromise (BEC) cost Australian businesses more than $152.6 million last year.

This makes it one of the most financially damaging cybercrimes on record.

AI has made these attacks harder to detect. The question for Accounts Payable (AP) teams is no longer whether they can identify suspicious requests. It is whether the processes around payments make fraud difficult regardless of how convincing it looks.

Adversary-in-the-Middle Attacks: How Phishing Sites Steal Your Active Login

You click a link, sign in, approve the MFA prompt, and get on with your day. Completely unaware that someone else just logged into your account at the same moment.

That scenario surprises many businesses, particularly those that rely on multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect cloud accounts. But this is exactly how Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) phishing attacks work.

Rather than stealing passwords for later use, these attacks silently hijack an already-authenticated session in real time.

MFA remains a core control, and getting it implemented correctly is still a critical first step for any business.

But AiTM attacks exploit something MFA was never designed to protect: the trusted session that exists after authentication has already completed.

The “Session Cookie” Hijack: Why MFA Can’t Always Save You

MFA is a strong front-door lock. But it’s not the only thing that decides whether someone can get in.

After you sign in, your browser keeps you logged in using a session token (often stored as a cookie). It’s the digital version of a wristband at an event: once you’ve been checked, the wristband proves you belong there. If an attacker steals that wristband, they may not need to beat your MFA prompt at all.

That’s the core of session cookie hijacking. The attacker isn’t “cracking” MFA. They’re skipping it by replaying your already authenticated session.

This isn’t a reason to stop using MFA. It’s a reason to stop treating MFA as the finish line.

When sessions can be stolen, the practical defence shifts to layered controls: phishing-resistant sign-ins, device hygiene, tighter session policies, and detection that catches suspicious access early.

The “Legacy Debt” Audit: Identifying the 3 Oldest Risks in Your Server Room

The most dangerous thing in a server room is often the phrase, “Don’t touch that.”

It’s usually said with a half-joke and a grimace. It refers to the old box that “still works”, runs something important, and has survived so many fixes and workarounds that nobody feels confident changing it anymore.

That’s legacy debt.

Not just “old tech”, but old tech that’s become a dependency. It’s the kind that quietly accumulates risk until it turns into downtime, security exposure, or an emergency upgrade at the worst possible time.

A legacy debt audit is the fast way to bring that risk back into the light.

The “Backup Exit” Strategy: Can You Move Your Data Without the Vendor’s Help?

When you first sign up for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, everything is designed to feel effortless.

The problem is that the first real test of a SaaS relationship isn’t the onboarding. It’s the exit.

For many small businesses, the front door is wide open, but the emergency exit is bolted shut: exports are incomplete, key data sits in proprietary formats, and leaving requires expensive vendor help.

That’s more than inconvenient. It’s a business risk.

As teams move toward a workforce blended with humans and Agentic AI in 2026, your advantage will come from data you can move, reuse, and trust. If your data can’t leave a vendor cleanly, you don’t fully control your processes. Then your options, timelines, and costs are controlled for you.

Micro-SaaS Vetting: The 5-Minute Security Check for Browser Extensions

Browser extensions have a funny reputation. They feel “small”. A quick install. A tiny productivity boost. A harmless little helper that lives in your toolbar.

But in practice, a browser extension is more like a micro-SaaS vendor sitting inside your browser session. It can see what you see, interact with the pages you open, and sometimes access the same cloud apps your business runs on all day.

That’s why a browser extension security check matters.

Not because every extension is bad, but because it only takes one over-permissioned add-on or one bad update to turn “helpful” into exposure.

The good news is you don’t need a 40-page policy to reduce the risk. A simple five-minute check can prevent most extension problems before they start.

LinkedIn “Social Engineering”: Protecting Your Staff from Fake Recruitment Scams

A fake recruiter message is one of the cleanest social engineering tricks around because it doesn’t look like a trick.

That’s why LinkedIn recruitment scams work so well inside real businesses.

They don’t arrive as malware. They arrive as a normal conversation that nudges someone toward one small action: click this link, open this file, “verify” this detail, move the chat to a different app.

A few simple checks, a couple of hard-stop rules, and an easy way to report suspicious outreach can shut these scams down without slowing anyone down.

“Clean Desk” 2.0: Securing Your Home Office from Physical Data Leaks

In the traditional office, a “Clean Desk” policy was a simple habit: shred the sensitive stuff, lock it away, and don’t leave passwords where someone can see them.

In 2026, the same idea still matters but the “desk” has changed.

For many teams, the home office is now the default workspace, and that means physical access can quickly become digital access. An unlocked screen, a shared device, or a laptop left in the wrong place can expose the same systems your business runs on every day.

Clean Desk 2.0 isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about securing the physical-to-digital bridge.

If a houseguest, a delivery person, or a thief can sit down at your workstation, they don’t need to be a master hacker to cause real damage. They just need a few unattended minutes and an open session.

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