Nov 25, 2025
Salesforce Orgs Are Facing Unprecedented Security Risk
In October 2025, a cybercriminal group claimed to have stolen nearly one billion records from companies using Salesforce CRM, targeting high‑profile brands like FedEx and Qantas.
Salesforce itself reported no compromise of its core platform, attackers instead went after the tools, people, and integrations around it, abusing overly broad access and third‑party connections.
This is the new reality: your Salesforce org isn’t just a CRM anymore. It’s the beating heart of your revenue engine, a hub for AI agents, and the place where almost every customer interaction leaves a trace. That makes it both business‑critical and highly attractive to attackers.
At the same time, the average enterprise now runs around 897 applications, but only about 29% are integrated with each other.
That fragmentation creates blind spots, manual workarounds, and a huge attack surface.
This article is a practical playbook for Salesforce admins, architects, and technology leaders who want to:
Strengthen Salesforce org security
Tame integration overload and unify the tech stack
Apply Zero Trust using tools like Salesforce Shield and Slack
Prepare for an AI‑driven future without sacrificing governance
Executive Summary
Salesforce is secure, until you touch it. Misconfigurations, app sprawl, and weak identity controls are now the biggest risk, not the core platform.
Your tech stack is amplifying security issues. With hundreds of apps and only a fraction integrated, sensitive data is copied, exported, and synced in ways that are hard to see and control.
Zero Trust + Salesforce Shield + Slack can form a modern security fabric. Encryption, event monitoring, and audit trails combined with a unified collaboration layer give you visibility and control.
AI agents are coming fast. Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise vision and Agentforce mean autonomous agents will act inside your CRM – which only works if your underlying data, permissions, and integrations are secure.
Why Salesforce Orgs Are Facing Unprecedented Security Risk
A few trends are colliding in 2025:
Salesforce is your system of record for everything.
Customer data, revenue, support, marketing, even product usage – it all lives in or flows through Salesforce. A breach no longer hits a single department; it hits your whole business.Attackers are going “around” Salesforce, not “through” it.
Recent incidents haven’t been about a flaw in the core platform. Instead, attackers leveraged:Social engineering targeting Salesforce users
Compromised devices and reused passwords
Third‑party tools with excessive API access
Misconfigured permissions that exposed far more data than needed
Cloud breaches are getting more expensive and frequent.
The average cost of a cloud data breach is now estimated at around $4.88M, with public cloud incidents even higher.
Salesforce is often where the most sensitive customer data sits, so even “partial” compromise can be devastating.The platform itself is more powerful – and more complex.
Features like Agentforce, Data Cloud, and deep Slack integration make Salesforce dramatically more capable.
But every new capability adds configuration, roles, integrations, and potential missteps. Many orgs are running security on 2018 assumptions in a 2025 environment.
Bottom line: Salesforce hasn’t suddenly become less secure. But the way we use it, with more integrations, AI, and automation, has radically increased the stakes.
Five Critical Security Gaps Teams Overlook
Let’s get concrete. Across orgs we see the same five gaps again and again.
1. Over‑Permissive Access Everywhere
Profiles that are too broad, Permission Sets that never get removed, and “temporary” access that becomes permanent. Admins are under pressure to “just make it work,” and security debt piles up.
Symptoms:
Users with “Modify All Data” who don’t need it
Contractors with full access to sensitive objects
Data exports via report builder that nobody tracks
Quick win: Commit to a least‑privilege, Permission Set–led model and start revoking broad access systematically.
2. Identity Controls That Stop at the Login Page
Many orgs have MFA turned on, but:
SSO isn’t enforced consistently across tools
IP restrictions and login hours are barely used
Password policies haven’t been revisited for years
Meanwhile, attackers are increasingly using phishing and session hijacking to steal tokens rather than passwords.
Quick win: Make identity the new perimeter, SSO, conditional access, device posture checks, and strict session management for all Salesforce access (including API and mobile).
3. “Rollback Will Save Us” Release Strategies
In 2025, publishing straight to production and relying on rollbacks is a risky fantasy:
Rollbacks and metadata restores might undo config changes – but they don’t bring lost data back.
Native tools focus on metadata recovery; data and relational integrity are a different problem.
If a deployment corrupts or deletes records, you need point‑in‑time backup and restore for data and metadata, not just a DevOps pipeline.
Quick win: Treat backup as part of your DevOps strategy, not a separate IT chore. Bake pre‑deployment snapshots and automated backup verification into your release process.
4. Unmonitored Integrations and Third‑Party Apps
Every connected app, managed package, and integration user is essentially a super‑employee:
They can often read or write huge volumes of data
They’re rarely monitored day‑to‑day
They may be developed by vendors you barely know
We’ve already seen breaches where malicious or compromised tools (like a Data Loader replacement or browser extension) exfiltrated Salesforce data at scale.
Quick win: Maintain an Integration Register that lists every app, what it can access, and who owns it. If nobody “owns” it, that’s a risk in itself.
5. Logging Without Actual Detection or Response
Audit logs and Shield Event Monitoring are powerful – but they don’t help if:
No one is looking at them
There are no alert thresholds
Security and Salesforce teams aren’t aligned
Meanwhile, attackers increasingly move laterally over days or weeks. Without detection, they can quietly exfiltrate reports, API data, or attachments before anyone notices.
Quick win: Integrate Salesforce events into your SIEM/SOC and define a small set of critical alerts (e.g., mass exports, new integration users, permission escalations).
How Fragmented Tech Stacks Magnify These Vulnerabilities
Security isn’t just a Salesforce problem. It’s a stack problem.
The 897‑App Problem
According to the 2025 MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark, organizations run an average of 897 applications, but only around 28–29% are actually integrated.
That means:
Data is copied manually into spreadsheets and side systems
Teams export from Salesforce to “work around” integration gaps
There’s no single place to see who accessed what, where
Every CSV export, local script, and shadow IT tool is another attack surface.
“Single Source of Truth” Is Often a Myth
Many leaders still talk about Salesforce as a single source of truth, but in practice:
Marketing lives in one platform
Product telemetry in another
Finance in yet another
If those systems aren’t connected, people start duplicating data, and security policies aren’t consistently applied.
Slack as a Unification Layer (If You Use It Deliberately)
Salesforce is now embedding Slack directly into CRM, with Salesforce Channels that connect records and Slack conversations in one shared context.
Done right, this can:
Pull work into a central collaboration space
Reduce app switching and screen scraping
Let you enforce Salesforce‑level permissions inside Slack
Done wrong, Slack just becomes yet another place where sensitive screenshots and data dumps live forever.
Takeaway: Fragmentation doesn’t just slow teams down. It multiplies security risks and makes incident response dramatically harder.
Practical Steps to Unify Systems, Data, and Permissions
Here’s a pragmatic roadmap you can start this quarter.
Step 1: Inventory Your Security Surface
Create a simple, brutally honest map of:
All Salesforce production orgs and sandboxes
All connected apps, integration users, and managed packages
All major data flows into/out of Salesforce (ETLs, APIs, exports)
Key collaboration hubs (Slack, email, file shares)
You’re not trying to fix everything yet, just see it.
Step 2: Design a Permission & Identity Blueprint
Work towards a model where:
SSO is mandatory for all Salesforce access
MFA is enforced at the IdP (and Salesforce) level
Object, field, and record access is driven by Permission Sets, not bloated profiles
High‑risk actions (mass exports, data deletions, permission changes) are restricted to a small set of admins
Document this as a Security & Sharing Model so new features don’t slip through the cracks.
Step 3: Prioritize Integrations that Reduce Risk (Not Just Add Features)
Use the MuleSoft/Connectivity thinking: prioritize integrations that remove manual exports or sensitive copies.
High‑value targets:
Data pipelines that feed analytics (remove CSV reports sent via email)
Marketing platforms that currently rely on list uploads
Support tools that sync cases via periodic bulk exports
Rule of thumb: If humans are moving sensitive data around manually, that’s an integration you should prioritize.
Step 4: Make Slack Your Secure Collaboration Hub, Not Shadow IT
If you’re using Slack with Salesforce:
Turn on Salesforce Channels and connect them to key objects like Accounts, Opportunities, and Cases
Ensure Slack inherits Salesforce permissions for data access, not separate ad‑hoc controls
Bring alerts (e.g., Shield events, backup failures, suspicious logins) into dedicated Slack channels where security and Salesforce teams collaborate in real time
This reduces the need for screenshots, rogue spreadsheets, and one‑off exports.
Step 5: Embed Backup and Restore Into Your DevOps Pipeline
Treat data protection as part of DevOps:
Pre‑deployment snapshots of critical objects and metadata
Automated post‑deployment checks for anomalies
Documented runbooks for partial and full restores
The goal isn’t just to “have backups” – it’s to prove you can restore quickly without making things worse.
How to Apply Zero Trust & Salesforce Shield Effectively
Zero Trust says: “Never trust, always verify.” No user, device, app, or network segment is inherently trusted – everything must prove itself, continuously.
Salesforce Shield is a key part of implementing this inside your org. Shield includes:
Platform Encryption – protect data at rest, keeping sensitive fields (PII, financials, health info) encrypted even from cloud admins
Event Monitoring – detailed logs of user and API behavior for detection and forensics
Field Audit Trail – long‑term history of changes to critical fields for compliance and investigation
Data Detect (in newer Shield bundles) – classification of sensitive data to apply the right controls
A Practical Zero Trust Model in Salesforce
Verify identity strongly and continuously
SSO + MFA + conditional access
Short session lifetimes for high‑risk users and integrations
Minimize access by design
Permission Set Groups aligned with roles and journeys (e.g., “Onboarding Sales Rep”, “Offboarding Contractor”)
Strict separation between environments (dev, test, prod)
Encrypt and classify sensitive data
Use Platform Encryption and Enhanced Personal Information Management for PII and regulated data
Monitor continuously
Pipe Shield events into a SIEM
Define clear runbooks for suspicious activity (mass export, login from unusual geography, API spike)
Assume breach; design for resilience
Regular restore tests
Incident simulations involving both security and Salesforce teams
Zero Trust is not a product you buy; it’s a design principle. Shield just gives you the building blocks inside Salesforce.
Make Security and Unification a Single Roadmap
If there’s one lesson from the recent “Salesforce‑adjacent” mega‑breaches, it’s this:
Most Salesforce incidents are not caused by a single catastrophic bug.
They’re caused by a thousand small decisions: loose permissions, untracked exports, unmonitored apps, no restore plan.
In 2025, you can’t afford to treat security and tech stack unification as separate projects. They’re the same project:
Every integration decision is a security decision.
Every AI initiative is a data governance decision.
Every Slack channel that touches Salesforce is a collaboration and compliance decision.
If you don’t have the internal bandwidth to design and execute this roadmap, bring in a partner, that lives at the intersection of Salesforce architecture, security, and DevOps.
Start with one section of the checklist, show quick wins, and let that momentum carry you toward a secure, unified Salesforce platform that’s ready for the next decade.