Coinbase Breach: Can You Act Quickly to an Insider Threat?

The real lesson from the Coinbase breach isn’t about bribed insiders; it’s about visibility and how quickly you can act on it.

When Coinbase announced that attackers had stolen sensitive customer data after bribing support representatives, the headlines followed a familiar rhythm: phishing, insider threat, ransom demand, data stolen. But if you’re still fixating on how the attackers got in, you’re likely missing the bigger point.

When a compromise occurs, time is critical. How fast can Coinbase—or any organization—identify and revoke an insider’s access across all SaaS applications? Can you immediately see an attacker’s potential reach and shut it down instantly?  

That’s the question more security teams need to ask. If your first step in an insider incident is to start digging through logs, spreadsheets, and Jira tickets to piece together a SaaS access map, you’re already behind.

SaaS Complexity Compounds Insider Threats

Let’s be honest: insider risk isn’t a novel problem. Unfortunately, employees go rogue, get tricked, or, as in this case, are paid off. What is new is the scale and obscurity of their access.

Access is no longer confined to one support tool and an internal portal; it encompasses dozens of SaaS apps with overlapping privileges. These include Slack integrations, Google Drive shares, third-party CRMs, embedded browser sessions, and long-forgotten tokens that still provide access to sensitive customer systems.

Identity tells you who someone is. Behavior tells you what they’re doing and whether it’s a problem. And if you can’t observe it in real time, you can’t stop it in time.

When Time is the Threat Vector

Every second after an insider begins to abuse access—or an attacker gains control of it—represents lost opportunity for containing the incident quickly.  

In a breach scenario, whoever moves faster controls the outcome. If your security team is racing to inventory one person’s access across dozens of SaaS apps after a breach begins, the attacker already has a significant advantage.

During an active incident, security teams need to know:

• Which apps can they access right now?  

• What permissions and data are exposed?  

• Where does access still linger, even outside IT governance?  

• What suspicious activity is already in progress?

This kind of visibility isn’t just about who has access—it’s about how that access is used and whether it matches what’s expected for their role and behavior. In most companies, that level of insight doesn’t exist. It’s scattered across disconnected admin panels, conditional access rules, and vague application logs, if it exists at all. And when time is working against you, the next question becomes: How far can the damage spread?

SaaS Defines the Blast Radius

When an insider gets compromised, your firewall or endpoints don’t define your blast radius. It’s defined by:

• Which SaaS apps they can access

• How permissions have sprawled over time

• What sensitive data is exposed through those apps

• Whether you even know those apps exist

The longer it takes to answer those questions, the more time attackers have to move, steal, and cover their tracks. And with ransom demands like the $20 million Coinbase rejected, the stakes are no longer theoretical.

What You Should Be Able to Answer Instantly

Whether someone is phished, bribed, or socially engineered, the outcome is the same: your internal access is now externalized, and if you don’t have real-time visibility into what that access touches, you’re flying blind.  

If someone on your team gets compromised tomorrow, you should be able to respond in minutes:

• See user SaaS access in real time

• Revoke access and OAuth scopes immediately

• Detect and respond to abnormal behavior

• Act before damage spreads

Otherwise, the window to contain the damage may already be closed.

Download Your Free Guide to Identity Security

Containment Starts with Context

The critical point of failure for most organizations isn’t the initial compromise itself, but the subsequent minutes and hours spent struggling to understand the scope of the breach. That’s where Grip ITDR 2.0 changes the equation.

To better equip security teams against the types of identity-driven SaaS risks seen in situations like the Coinbase scenario, Grip ITDR 2.0 delivers a live, contextual view and instant response capabilities.  

Instead of manually stitching together logs and permissions, SecOps teams can now:

• Detect threats across both managed and shadow SaaS in real time, including risky OAuth grants, newly installed browser extensions, and signs of privilege escalation.

• Map the blast radius instantly, including a visualization of affected users, apps, and behavioral anomalies.

• Contain and remediate threats with a single click: quarantine compromised identities, revoke or block OAuth grants, terminate active sessions, and shut down malicious extensions before damage spreads.

Unlike traditional tools focused on login activity, Grip ITDR 2.0 delves deeper to identify post-authentication threats. It provides a comprehensive understanding of user behavior, deviations from the norm, and the potential scope of risk, moving beyond simple identity verification. Explore how Grip enables SecOps teams to do more.

Containment isn’t just a strategy; it’s your strongest defense when time becomes the threat vector. In a world where every second counts, the true power of containment lies in its ability to neutralize threats swiftly and effectively.

SaaS Is Freedom—and Risk

SaaS enables agility, and that’s not changing. But we must acknowledge the evolving threat landscape. The Coinbase attack is a potent reminder: breaches often occur not through brute force, but via compromised insiders, providing a clear path to critical systems and valuable information. Defenders need that same level of clarity—proactively, not reactively.  

Don’t wait for a breach to tell you what you should’ve seen.Grip ITDR 2.0 gives you real-time SaaS visibility and control. Book time with our team to learn more.

‍