Salesforce is one of the most secure enterprise platforms on the market. Its core security program, ongoing patches, and transparent advisories reflect a mature, cloud-first posture.
Most data exposures involving Salesforce don’t originate in the platform itself. They emerge at the edges, where customization, configuration sprawl, and third-party integrations create complex, shifting attack surfaces. In other words: Salesforce is safe; what you build on top of it may not be.
We’ll explore these seven ways Salesforce customizability creates data security vulnerabilities:
1. Customization Creates Complexity
Salesforce’s value lies in its flexibility—custom objects, Experience/Community sites, low-code industry components, and deep app integrations.
That same flexibility multiplies decision points: which profiles and permission sets to use, which sharing rules, which OAuth scopes, which guest user settings, and which managed packages to trust.
Each decision is a small aperture. Thousands of them together make an attack surface. Every third-party integration creates another opportunity for corruption, accidental deletions, and unintended entry points. Even well-intended, low-code extensions can introduce exposure pathways if not governed rigorously.
2. Breaches as a Result of Misconfiguration
A recurring pattern across SaaS incidents is misconfiguration. This includes overly broad sharing rules, guest user access, and permissive defaults that linger long after the initial go-live.
A now-famous case from 2023 showed how misconfigured Salesforce Community sites allowed unauthenticated users to query records containing sensitive data across multiple organizations, including government and healthcare.
That issue wasn’t a zero-day exploit; it was an access model set incorrectly—and it proved widespread.
3. Third-Party OAuth Connections
Every connected app you authorize, including marketing automation, enrichment tools, GTM add-ons, and custom integrations, extends your trust boundary.
OAuth scopes that default to read/write access and persistent tokens can give external services broad reach into Salesforce data. The governance gap surrounds app-to-app connectivity and “shadow SaaS,” where employees connect tools directly to core systems like Salesforce without security review.
The result: unmonitored data flows and privileges that outlive their legitimate use.
4. Over-Permissioned Users
Breaches rarely require Hollywood-style exploits when everyday access is too broad. Many enterprises carry years of “permission debt”—legacy profiles, cloned permission sets, and emergency access that was never revoked.
There are sharp increases in SaaS incidents and growing concern about over-permissioned identities—human and non-human—especially where organizations lack dedicated SaaS security posture management.
In one survey, nearly three-quarters of organizations reported a SaaS breach over a 12-month period. Others found far higher rates of SaaS security incidents, with misconfigurations and excessive permissions frequently cited as root causes.
5. Recent Lessons from the Field
In 2025, Google disclosed that attackers accessed a corporate Salesforce instance and stole business customer data. The intrusion reportedly leveraged social-engineering tactics and credential resets—not a flaw in Salesforce’s core security. The takeaway? Strong identity controls and tight app governance matter as much as platform hardening.
We mentioned how investigations showed that poorly configured guest access on public Experience sites exposed sensitive records at scale. Years later, researchers continue to find organizations with similar weaknesses—evidence that configuration drift and insufficient continuous monitoring keep old risks alive.
AppOmni researchers documented more than 20 insecure behaviors and configuration risks in Salesforce Industry Cloud components, some with CVEs, underscoring that rapid development must be paired with disciplined security reviews, least-privilege defaults, and automated checks.
6. Why These Problems Persist
Speed over guardrails. Business teams move fast to meet revenue or service goals; security reviews lag.
Opaque connectivity. Traditional network-centric controls don’t see app-to-app OAuth connections, making it hard to inventory who (or what) can touch which objects and fields.
Permission debt. Cloned profiles and one-off exceptions accumulate.
Periodic, not continuous, assurance. Many orgs still rely on annual audits or static config snapshots, which miss day-to-day drift. Analysts note that SaaS is now a top breach vector while only a minority of enterprises use dedicated SSPM for continuous control monitoring, which is precisely the gap adversaries exploit.
7. Principles for Resilient Salesforce Customizations
Start with a “secure core” mental model. Assume Salesforce’s default posture is robust. Your job is not to out-engineer the platform but to avoid eroding that core through customization.
Reduce blast radius by design.
- Enforce least privilege using permission set groups and muting; retire cloned legacy profiles and emergency access systematically.
- Treat Experience/Community guest access as internet-facing: deny by default, vet every object/field exposure, and regularly test with unauthenticated probes.
Govern third-party apps like suppliers.
- Create an allowlist for managed packages and OAuth apps; review scopes before approval; prefer fine-grained, read-only scopes where possible.
- Continuously inventory tokens and integrations; auto-expire unused connections; alert on new high-scope grants. Research shows attackers increasingly exploit app-to-app connectivity to reach “crown jewel” platforms like Salesforce.
Make continuous monitoring non-negotiable.
- Shift from annual audits to always-on checks for sharing rules, FLS, guest access, token proliferation, and anomalous data pulls.
- Given the rise in SaaS incidents, consider dedicated SSPM or equivalent monitoring to catch drift quickly rather than after an exposure.
Engineer for change.
- Standardize change control for configuration (not just code): pre-merge security checks for metadata (profiles, permission sets, flows) and institute a rollback plan for risky access changes.
- Treat low-code assets (Flows, OmniStudio, Industry components) as code: version, review, test, and scan.
Measure what matters.
Tie controls to business impact: customer trust, audit findings closed, incident MTTR, and avoided data-handling violations.
Track time-to-revoke for privileged access, percent of users on least-privilege roles, number of apps with high-risk scopes, and count of public/guest exposures prevented in testing.
Strong Platform, Stronger Governance
Salesforce isn’t the weak link—improperly governed customizations are. The platform’s security advisories and patch cadence are table stakes.
What differentiates trustworthy organizations is how they control the edges: Experience sites, low-code extensions, permission sprawl, and third-party OAuth.
The path forward is clear: continuous monitoring, least-privilege by default, supplier-grade governance for connected apps, and a culture that treats configuration with the same discipline as code. Leveraging an automated security posture management tool is critical for continuous coverage.
In a world where SaaS breaches are becoming increasingly common, resilience is no longer about trusting your vendors; it’s about verifying your own customizations—every day.