Summary:
A recent article in The Hacker News points out a far too common but critical misunderstanding in SaaS security: misconfigurations too often are inappropriately conflated with software vulnerabilities, but they differ. Misconfigurations are user-controlled setup issues, e.g., inappropriately permissive access, unwatched third-party integrations, or exposed data, while vulnerabilities are the product of errors within the vendor's codebase and can only be fixed by the vendor. This is significant since companies overestimate how much vendors contribute to catching setup errors and put themselves at risk for breaches that are self-inflicted.

Analyst Comments:
While seemingly pedantic, this misunderstanding costs money and causes repeated exposure. Most groups assume that their security position is vendor-managed and forget to audit their own configurations. The ensuing holes tend to comprise excessive permissions, open endpoints, poor identity policies, and misplaced reliance on default configurations. In the real world, vulnerabilities such as an internal portal accidentally exposed or a third-party app with wide access can pose risk even in the absence of a single vulnerable bug in the underlying software. Misconfigurations are simply invisible to normal alerting and detection tools because these threats are built into configuration, not user behavior, and do not create real-time logs.

Research supports this problem: in smaller organizations in particular, attacks are more and more often credited to misconfiguration errors and not to actual code vulnerabilities. For example, credential abuse or exposed management interfaces account for most breaches, and that means that attackers exploit such low-hanging but high-impact states.

Suggested Corrections:
Know your place under the shared responsibility model, securing SaaS platforms requires active configuration stewardship from your side.

Periodically audit and enforce baseline configurations, such as identity and access policy, from app to IAM roles.

Use CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) and configuration monitoring to detect drift over time, and not just periodically scan.

Expect misconfigurations are baked into existing infrastructure; implement ongoing assessment and remediation processes.

Train staff to view config mistakes as intrinsic security risks—not an issue of usability or set-up error—to align culture around prevention.

Link(s):
https://thehackernews.com/2025/08/misconfigurations-are-not.html