Is Slack Secure For Your Business?
Slack is used as a communal discussion center for businesses and it has increased in popularity in the last few years. Slack now has 10 million daily active users, making it the leading platform for live discussions within organisations.
Slack is used by 65 of the top Fortune 100 companies and over 85,000 businesses, from SMBs to large enterprises, are using the paid tier of Slack within their business. Slack is a great place to have secure conversations, but that doesn't mean you should treat it like it's watertight.
Never use Slack to share secrets such as passwords, sensitive customer data, or valuable corporate IP. Anything highly confidential should be kept off the platform.
For Slack’s millions of daily users, the chat system represents more than just a communications tool. It also functions as a digital water cooler for company gossip, a channel for the airing grievances and a mentorship platform for junior employees can interact directly with senior counterparts. And in some cases, a platform that employees share sensitive and important login details and passwords.
The intimate nature of Slack leads most users to the assumption that their communications are confidential. However, there are a number of security blind spots on Slack that leave companies in a vulnerable position.
Slack does encrypt your messages. According to the company's security page, it secures your messages both when they are in transit between parties (i.e., when you send them) and when they are at rest.
This huge number of users represents an opportunity for hackers to utilize the platform to infiltrate networks and gain access to sensitive data. So, how secure is the Slack platform and should your organization be thinking of security solutions to protect this attack vector?
When Slack first launched in 2013, it was branded as a friendly alternative to Microsoft’s team tools. You could communicate instantly using this platform, with group messages and full conversation logs. However, in 2015 Slack was hacked, revealing the holes in its security. The company announced that over four days it’s systems had been hacked, compromising some of its users’ data. This included email addresses, usernames, encrypted passwords.
Recently, another security problem became clear as Slack allowed hackers to remotely exploit a vulnerability in Slack allowing them to input malware or alter information. The problem has been fixed by Slack, but the attack surface remains large.
Slack has become a platform where users must be vigilant about looking out for phishing attacks and spam messages. Because Slack is invite-only, users assume that their workspace is secure, but this is not always the case. In 2017, a group of hackers used an account pretending to be a ‘Slackbot’, which sent out a phishing attack directing people to a fake site where their financial details were collected.
These types of phishing attacks through Slack could be potentially much more damaging than a similar campaign would be through email.
It’s important to remember that even if your co-workers or your manager might not have easy access to your private Slack messages, there’s still a lot they can learn about you based on your profile, like your time zone, your contact information, phone number, location, and social media that you might have put on Slack. You could also find their member ID number, which might not be too revealing, and files that they’ve sent by clicking through on their individual profile, which would potentially be more revealing.
Like email, Slack is an incredibly useful and productive communications tool for businesses. Also, like email, businesses will not stop using Slack because of the security concerns. All businesses should be considering the security of Slack and the steps they can take to make sure their employees and sensitive data and financial information sent through Slack is safe.
Expert Insights: Threatstack: Mic: PasswordBoss: Vox: Image: Iconscout
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