As IT teams struggle to keep up with the ever-growing number of OAuth grants, a ticking time bomb is quietly accumulating in many organizations’ security profiles. Every day, employees click “Allow” on consent screens, creating new trust relationships between apps that can access corporate data. While these decisions take mere seconds, reviewing them properly requires a significant amount of time and resources.
For most companies, the question isn’t whether employees will connect apps to corporate data – they already have, thousands of times over. The real challenge is keeping up with the sheer volume of grants, knowing which ones carry real risk and which ones should be revoked without manually reviewing each one. This is where Nudge Security comes in, offering a solution to manage OAuth grant risk.
One common misunderstanding about OAuth grants is that they inherit the controls built around user identity. However, this isn’t the case. OAuth is a separate protocol from authentication, and it doesn’t share the same security measures as Single Sign-On (SSO) or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). What’s more, OAuth grants outlast employee credentials and can remain active even after the employee has left the company.
Attackers are well aware of this vulnerability. In a recent breach at Vercel, the root cause was a compromised OAuth token from Context.ai, a third-party AI tool that an employee had connected to their enterprise Google Workspace account months earlier. This incident highlights the alarming rate at which OAuth grants are being created and exploited.
The numbers are staggering: 88 average OAuth grants per employee, with 31 of them carrying data-level permissions (Nudge Security), and 40 average apps per organization with programmatic access to sensitive corporate data (Nudge Security). By 2027, a whopping 50% of SaaS breaches will stem from overprivileged OAuth tokens (Gartner).
The current state of OAuth grants is a problem that nobody seems to be managing. They operate outside the scope of SSO, outlast employee credentials, and move data through pathways that network controls can’t see. This requires their own lifecycle and access review process, which many organizations are still struggling to implement.
A thorough review of a single OAuth grant involves checking the app’s profile, verifying its security and compliance program, and reviewing the grantor’s role and requested scopes. Reaching out to the grantor to understand the business need and checking their MFA status is also essential. However, this process can take up to 45 minutes per grant, making it an impossible task for tens of thousands.
To manage OAuth grant risk effectively, organizations need agentic capabilities that can cover their vast attack surface. Nudge Security offers a solution by providing complete OAuth visibility into grants and app-to-app integrations across the SaaS estate from the start. This includes dormant and identity-only grants, as well as API keys, service accounts, and remote MCP server connections.
With Nudge Security, organizations can find every OAuth grant, assess the risk signals, and take corrective action to minimize their exposure. In a world where manual reviews are no longer feasible, agentic capabilities like those offered by Nudge Security have become essential for managing OAuth grant risk and protecting corporate data from unauthorized access.
Source: Bleeping Computer — 2026-10-08