Shadow IT refers to any hardware, software, application, or cloud service that employees use for work purposes without the knowledge or formal approval of the IT department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The “shadow” part is not about intent. It is about visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These tools operate completely outside the organisation’s official technology stack. That means IT cannot monitor them, security teams cannot protect them, compliance teams cannot assess them, and no one knows what data is flowing through them or where it ends up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scale is much larger than most leaders expect. According to Gartner, 41% of enterprise employees were already using technology outside IT oversight in 2022. Gartner projects that figure will climb to 75% by 2027. Shadow IT is not an edge case or a niche problem in careless organisations. It is becoming the default state of most workplaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understanding it clearly is the first step to managing it properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>Common Examples of Shadow IT<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Common-Examples-of-Shadow-IT.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nShadow IT takes many forms. Some of it looks obviously risky. Most of it looks completely harmless on the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- Cloud Storage & File Sharing<\/strong>: an employee uses personal Dropbox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer to share a sensitive file as the company’s system is too slow, complicated, and requires too many steps to upload. This file has now entered into a space IT cannot monitor or control from a contractual standpoint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Browser Extensions<\/strong>: an employee installs some browser extensions to boost productivity, while this could have access to all data read by the browser, including private information of customers and the company’s dashboards and login credentials.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Communication & Collaboration Tools<\/strong>: a team uses WhatsApp, Telegram, or a free account of Slack to collaborate, as the official tool looks complicated. Work-related conversations, decisions, and files have moved to an unofficial space where no one has the ability to audit and retain them for compliance purposes.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Project Management applications<\/strong>: a department buys Trello, Asana, or Notion without going through the procurement process since the approved system did not serve their purpose. Client data and project information sit within this unknown territory.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- AI Tools<\/strong>: employees paste business data into ChatGPT<\/strong><\/a>, Gemini, Copilot, or other generative AI tools for drafting, coding, data analyzing, or summarizing documents. Data gets submitted to systems for which the company has no control at all (let alone visibility).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Using Personal devices<\/strong>: an employee is accessing his\/her company emails, internal systems, and data files from his\/her personal mobile phones\/laptop, without the proper enterprise-level security, without Mobile Device Management (MDM) coverage, plus it might be used by other members of the family as well.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Developer Cloud Environments<\/strong>: developer accesses a personal cloud instance to reach his project deadline, using his\/her own account, circumventing the procurement process, security review, and access control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
The common thread in all of these is that IT never knew they existed. Which means every risk those tools carry is a risk the organisation is absorbing completely blind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>Why Does Shadow IT Keep Happening?<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n![\"shadow](\"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Why-Shadow-IT.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMost organisations treat shadow IT as a discipline problem. It is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a gap problem. Employees resort to unofficial tools because the official alternatives are not meeting their needs, and the system for getting those needs met is too slow. Understanding why it happens is the only way to address it in a way that actually works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The approved tools do not do the job.<\/strong> Official software is often selected for cost, compliance, or standardisation reasons rather than usability. The result is tools that are technically acceptable but practically frustrating. When 61% of employees report not being completely satisfied with the technologies their company provides, shadow IT fills the gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe approval process takes too long.<\/strong> Research from JumpCloud<\/a><\/strong> found that only 12% of IT departments can keep pace with technology requests from the rest of the business. When a team needs a tool to hit a deadline this week and the approval process takes three weeks, they do not wait. They find their own solution and move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRemote and hybrid work made the problem worse.<\/strong> When employees work from home, the natural friction of workplace norms disappears. The line between personal tools and work tools blurs. Personal devices, personal accounts, and personal software all move into the working day, often without anyone noticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSaaS made it trivially easy.<\/strong> A generation ago, installing software meant involving IT. Today, anyone can sign up for a powerful SaaS platform in ninety seconds using their work email address, no credit card required, no IT involvement needed, no procurement process triggered. The barriers that once kept shadow IT contained have essentially disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe answer to shadow IT is therefore not stricter enforcement. It is making the approved path genuinely easier than the shadow one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>The Real Risks of Shadow IT<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n![\"Risks](\"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Risks-of-Shadow-IT.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe risks created by shadow IT are not theoretical. They show up in breach reports, compliance investigations, and financial audits every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Security Vulnerabilities<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Every unauthorised tool is an entry point that your security team cannot see or protect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT applications typically lack the security controls that vetted enterprise tools are required to have. They may store data without proper encryption. They may not support multi-factor authentication. They may have misconfigured access permissions. And when employees leave your organisation, their access to these tools is rarely revoked, because IT never knew they existed in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of these applications expands your attack surface in ways that are completely invisible to the people responsible for defending it. Attackers do not need to breach your well-defended core systems if there is an unmonitored file-sharing app full of sensitive documents that nobody is watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average global cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. Shadow IT consistently features in post-breach investigations as an entry point or contributing factor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Compliance and Regulatory Failures<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Many industries operate under strict regulations that require organisations to know exactly where their data is, how it is processed, who can access it, and how long it is retained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT makes compliance impossible, not difficult, impossible. If a team member is storing client data in an unsanctioned cloud service hosted in a different jurisdiction, your organisation may be violating GDPR, HIPAA, or other applicable regulations without anyone realising it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under GDPR, organisations are required to report data breaches to authorities within 72 hours. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue. If the breach originated in a shadow IT tool, your compliance team may not even know there was a breach until long after that window has closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understanding the full scope of what is a data breach<\/strong><\/a> and how they originate is critical for organisations trying to get compliance under control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n3. Hidden Costs and Financial Waste<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT is expensive in ways that rarely surface cleanly in any budget report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gartner estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30 to 40% of total IT spending in large organisations. That is money spent on tools that are not tracked, not negotiated at enterprise scale, not consolidated, and often duplicating functionality already available in approved systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Research by Productiv found that the average company wastes $135,000 annually on unnecessary or redundant SaaS tools. Much of that waste originates in shadow IT, where multiple teams independently adopt the same categories of tools without visibility into what already exists or what is already approved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Data Loss and Shadow Data<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT creates shadow data: sensitive corporate information stored in unmanaged, unmonitored locations that the organisation has no control over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When an employee shares a document via a personal cloud account, that document does not come back when they leave the company. When a team uses an unsanctioned messaging app for work discussions, those communications are not captured in your corporate data retention systems. When a developer stores credentials in a personal code repository, those credentials may be exposed without anyone ever knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow data is a natural byproduct of shadow IT, and it is one of the hardest aspects of the problem to quantify or recover from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>Shadow AI: The Fastest Growing Shadow IT Problem Right Now<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nShadow IT has always been a challenge. In 2024 and 2025, it acquired a significantly more dangerous dimension: shadow AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The explosion of generative AI tools has created a new category of shadow IT that moves faster, reaches further, and carries higher risk than most traditional examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Employees are using AI tools, sometimes multiple different ones, to write content, summarise documents, analyse data, generate code, and process information. Company data, customer records, internal communications, and confidential strategic information are being pasted into systems the organisation has no visibility into and often no contractual protection over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to a Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index report, 78% of workers were already using personal AI tools at work in 2024, and the majority had not disclosed this to their employer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The security implications are serious. Data submitted to third-party AI systems may be used for model training, stored on external servers, or exposed through the platform’s own security vulnerabilities. Many free AI tools have limited or no enterprise data protection guarantees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ISACA’s 2025 research found that AI-associated data breach cases cost organisations more than $650,000 per incident above baseline breach costs. Shadow AI is not a future concern. It is already generating measurable financial damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For organisations that already grapple with attack surface management<\/strong><\/a>, shadow AI represents a rapidly expanding and largely invisible new frontier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>How Shadow IT Leads to Data Breaches<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nUnderstanding the connection between shadow IT and data breaches is where the stakes become most concrete. Shadow IT does not cause breaches in one single way. It creates multiple distinct vulnerabilities simultaneously, most of them completely invisible to the people responsible for defending your organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unpatched Vulnerabilities in Unmanaged Tools<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Approved software sits inside a managed security process. IT teams monitor for vulnerabilities, apply patches, and track the security status of every tool in the official stack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT tools sit completely outside that process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When a critical vulnerability is discovered in an application your IT team does not know exists, nobody receives the alert, nobody schedules the patch, and nobody fixes it. The vulnerability stays open indefinitely. Attackers who find it can exploit it at their leisure, with no race against a patch cycle to worry about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Credential Reuse Across Personal and Work Accounts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Employees signing up for shadow IT tools almost always use their work email address. Many also reuse passwords they have already used elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If those credentials appear in a breach of an entirely unrelated service and end up on a dark web marketplace<\/strong><\/a>, attackers now have working credentials for a tool that contains real company data. They did not need to hack anything. They simply logged in.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is one of the most common and most preventable breach pathways, and it happens constantly through tools that IT never knew about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Data Exfiltration Through Trusted-Looking Channels<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Once an attacker gains access to a shadow IT tool that contains company data, extracting that data is straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The traffic looks like normal employee activity to any monitoring system watching the corporate network. There are no unusual commands, no suspicious file transfers, no alerts triggered. The data simply leaves through a channel that was never supposed to carry it in the first place, and nobody notices until long after it is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Orphaned Access After Employee Departure<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
When an employee leaves your organisation, IT runs through a deprovisioning checklist. Every system on that list gets access revoked. Shadow IT tools are never on the list because IT never knew they existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Former employees can retain access to company data stored in shadow systems for months or years after their departure. That access is live, functional, and completely unmonitored. Research by Stitchflow found that 53% of security breaches involve orphaned accounts belonging to former employees. Shadow IT is a significant contributor to that number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why Dark Web Monitoring Closes This Gap<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
No matter how well you manage shadow IT, some exposure will happen. Credentials from tools you did not know about will surface in breach databases. Data will appear in places it should not be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dark web monitoring<\/strong><\/a> is the safety net for exactly this scenario. When credentials from shadow IT tools appear in dark web forums and criminal marketplaces after a breach, continuous monitoring detects that exposure before attackers can act on it. That early warning is often the difference between a contained incident and a full-scale breach.<\/p>\n\n\n\nYou can run a free check right now using a free email scanner<\/strong><\/a> to see whether your credentials are already circulating where they should not be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>How to Manage Shadow IT Without Killing Productivity<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe wrong response to shadow IT is a blanket prohibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Locking everything down frustrates the employees who are just trying to do their jobs well. It drives shadow IT underground rather than eliminating it, because the underlying need does not go away when the policy tightens. And it signals that IT is an obstacle to productivity rather than an enabler of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The right approach is visibility first, then fast and legitimate alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Start with an honest audit.<\/strong> You cannot manage what you cannot see. SaaS management and discovery tools can identify applications connecting to your corporate systems, including ones IT never approved. Start with a clear picture of what actually exists before deciding what to do about it. Most organisations are surprised by how many tools they find.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCreate a fast-track approval process.<\/strong> If the standard approval process takes three weeks, shadow IT will always be faster and more attractive. A streamlined, low-friction path for lower-risk tools with clear criteria removes the main incentive to bypass IT entirely. Speed of approval is a security control.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBuild and maintain an approved tool catalogue.<\/strong> Make it genuinely easy for employees to find vetted, approved alternatives to common shadow tools. If the sanctioned option does the job well, most employees will use it. If the catalogue is difficult to navigate or the tools in it are noticeably worse than what they can find themselves, they will not.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEducate on why it matters, not just that it is policy.<\/strong> Employees who understand the compliance and security consequences of shadow IT make better decisions. Employees who have only been told it is against the rules look for workarounds. The goal is informed behaviour, not obedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBuild proper offboarding controls.<\/strong> Deprovisioning access to approved tools at offboarding is standard practice. Deprovisioning shadow tools is harder, which is why 53% of security breaches involve orphaned accounts belonging to former employees. Any discovered shadow IT tool should be documented and included in the offboarding checklist from that point forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\nExtend monitoring to the dark web.<\/strong> Even with the best shadow IT management practices, employees will occasionally use tools that create exposure. DarkScout’s dark web monitoring<\/a> scans continuously for credentials and corporate data surfacing in breach databases, hacker forums, and criminal marketplaces. When a shadow IT tool your team never knew about becomes the source of a breach, that monitoring is what tells you before the damage escalates.<\/p>\n\n\n\nConnecting shadow IT management to broader cybersecurity compliance<\/a> frameworks ensures the controls you put in place actually meet the regulatory requirements your organisation operates under.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>The Bottom Line<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nShadow IT is not a problem created by careless or malicious employees. It is a symptom of the gap between what people need to do their jobs well and what the official IT environment provides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The organisations that manage it most effectively are the ones that close that gap rather than try to enforce their way around it. That means genuinely useful approved tools, faster approval processes, honest visibility into what is actually in use, and monitoring systems that catch the consequences of exposure before they escalate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every unapproved tool is an entry point someone is not watching. That is the risk worth taking seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want to see how exposed your organisation already is, DarkScout monitors the dark web 24\/7<\/a> and alerts you the moment your credentials or data appear somewhere they should not be. Start with a free email scan<\/a> and find out what is already out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your employees are probably using apps and tools your IT team has never heard of. Not because they are trying to cause problems. They found something that works better than what they were given, signed up in two minutes using their work email, and got on with the job. It is practical, it is human, and it is happening in almost every organisation on earth. This is shadow IT. And while the intent is almost never malicious, the consequences can be. This guide covers exactly what shadow IT is, why it keeps happening despite every policy written to stop it, the real risks it creates for your organisation, and how to manage it in a way that actually works. What Is Shadow IT? Shadow IT refers to any hardware, software, application, or cloud service that employees use for work purposes without the knowledge or formal approval of the IT department. The “shadow” part is not about intent. It is about visibility. These tools operate completely outside the organisation’s official technology stack. That means IT cannot monitor them, security teams cannot protect them, compliance teams cannot assess them, and no one knows what data is flowing through them or where it ends up. The scale is much larger than most leaders expect. According to Gartner, 41% of enterprise employees were already using technology outside IT oversight in 2022. Gartner projects that figure will climb to 75% by 2027. Shadow IT is not an edge case or a niche problem in careless organisations. It is becoming the default state of most workplaces. Understanding it clearly is the first step to managing it properly. Common Examples of Shadow IT Shadow IT takes many forms. Some of it looks obviously risky. Most of it looks completely harmless on the surface. The common thread in all of these is that IT never knew they existed. Which means every risk those tools carry is a risk the organisation is absorbing completely blind. Why Does Shadow IT Keep Happening? Most organisations treat shadow IT as a discipline problem. It is not. It is a gap problem. Employees resort to unofficial tools because the official alternatives are not meeting their needs, and the system for getting those needs met is too slow. Understanding why it happens is the only way to address it in a way that actually works. The approved tools do not do the job. Official software is often selected for cost, compliance, or standardisation reasons rather than usability. The result is tools that are technically acceptable but practically frustrating. When 61% of employees report not being completely satisfied with the technologies their company provides, shadow IT fills the gap. The approval process takes too long. Research from JumpCloud found that only 12% of IT departments can keep pace with technology requests from the rest of the business. When a team needs a tool to hit a deadline this week and the approval process takes three weeks, they do not wait. They find their own solution and move on. Remote and hybrid work made the problem worse. When employees work from home, the natural friction of workplace norms disappears. The line between personal tools and work tools blurs. Personal devices, personal accounts, and personal software all move into the working day, often without anyone noticing. SaaS made it trivially easy. A generation ago, installing software meant involving IT. Today, anyone can sign up for a powerful SaaS platform in ninety seconds using their work email address, no credit card required, no IT involvement needed, no procurement process triggered. The barriers that once kept shadow IT contained have essentially disappeared. The answer to shadow IT is therefore not stricter enforcement. It is making the approved path genuinely easier than the shadow one. The Real Risks of Shadow IT The risks created by shadow IT are not theoretical. They show up in breach reports, compliance investigations, and financial audits every year. 1. Security Vulnerabilities Every unauthorised tool is an entry point that your security team cannot see or protect. Shadow IT applications typically lack the security controls that vetted enterprise tools are required to have. They may store data without proper encryption. They may not support multi-factor authentication. They may have misconfigured access permissions. And when employees leave your organisation, their access to these tools is rarely revoked, because IT never knew they existed in the first place. Each of these applications expands your attack surface in ways that are completely invisible to the people responsible for defending it. Attackers do not need to breach your well-defended core systems if there is an unmonitored file-sharing app full of sensitive documents that nobody is watching. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average global cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. Shadow IT consistently features in post-breach investigations as an entry point or contributing factor. 2. Compliance and Regulatory Failures Many industries operate under strict regulations that require organisations to know exactly where their data is, how it is processed, who can access it, and how long it is retained. Shadow IT makes compliance impossible, not difficult, impossible. If a team member is storing client data in an unsanctioned cloud service hosted in a different jurisdiction, your organisation may be violating GDPR, HIPAA, or other applicable regulations without anyone realising it. Under GDPR, organisations are required to report data breaches to authorities within 72 hours. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue. If the breach originated in a shadow IT tool, your compliance team may not even know there was a breach until long after that window has closed. Understanding the full scope of what is a data breach and how they originate is critical for organisations trying to get compliance under control. 3. Hidden Costs and Financial Waste Shadow IT is expensive in ways that rarely surface cleanly in any budget report. Gartner estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30 to 40% of total IT spending<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[21,41],"class_list":["post-2968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity","tag-shadow-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2973,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions\/2973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nShadow IT takes many forms. Some of it looks obviously risky. Most of it looks completely harmless on the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- Cloud Storage & File Sharing<\/strong>: an employee uses personal Dropbox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer to share a sensitive file as the company’s system is too slow, complicated, and requires too many steps to upload. This file has now entered into a space IT cannot monitor or control from a contractual standpoint.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Browser Extensions<\/strong>: an employee installs some browser extensions to boost productivity, while this could have access to all data read by the browser, including private information of customers and the company’s dashboards and login credentials.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Communication & Collaboration Tools<\/strong>: a team uses WhatsApp, Telegram, or a free account of Slack to collaborate, as the official tool looks complicated. Work-related conversations, decisions, and files have moved to an unofficial space where no one has the ability to audit and retain them for compliance purposes.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Project Management applications<\/strong>: a department buys Trello, Asana, or Notion without going through the procurement process since the approved system did not serve their purpose. Client data and project information sit within this unknown territory.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- AI Tools<\/strong>: employees paste business data into ChatGPT<\/strong><\/a>, Gemini, Copilot, or other generative AI tools for drafting, coding, data analyzing, or summarizing documents. Data gets submitted to systems for which the company has no control at all (let alone visibility).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Using Personal devices<\/strong>: an employee is accessing his\/her company emails, internal systems, and data files from his\/her personal mobile phones\/laptop, without the proper enterprise-level security, without Mobile Device Management (MDM) coverage, plus it might be used by other members of the family as well.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Developer Cloud Environments<\/strong>: developer accesses a personal cloud instance to reach his project deadline, using his\/her own account, circumventing the procurement process, security review, and access control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
The common thread in all of these is that IT never knew they existed. Which means every risk those tools carry is a risk the organisation is absorbing completely blind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>Why Does Shadow IT Keep Happening?<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMost organisations treat shadow IT as a discipline problem. It is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a gap problem. Employees resort to unofficial tools because the official alternatives are not meeting their needs, and the system for getting those needs met is too slow. Understanding why it happens is the only way to address it in a way that actually works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The approved tools do not do the job.<\/strong> Official software is often selected for cost, compliance, or standardisation reasons rather than usability. The result is tools that are technically acceptable but practically frustrating. When 61% of employees report not being completely satisfied with the technologies their company provides, shadow IT fills the gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The approval process takes too long.<\/strong> Research from JumpCloud<\/a><\/strong> found that only 12% of IT departments can keep pace with technology requests from the rest of the business. When a team needs a tool to hit a deadline this week and the approval process takes three weeks, they do not wait. They find their own solution and move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Remote and hybrid work made the problem worse.<\/strong> When employees work from home, the natural friction of workplace norms disappears. The line between personal tools and work tools blurs. Personal devices, personal accounts, and personal software all move into the working day, often without anyone noticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SaaS made it trivially easy.<\/strong> A generation ago, installing software meant involving IT. Today, anyone can sign up for a powerful SaaS platform in ninety seconds using their work email address, no credit card required, no IT involvement needed, no procurement process triggered. The barriers that once kept shadow IT contained have essentially disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answer to shadow IT is therefore not stricter enforcement. It is making the approved path genuinely easier than the shadow one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>The Real Risks of Shadow IT<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe risks created by shadow IT are not theoretical. They show up in breach reports, compliance investigations, and financial audits every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Security Vulnerabilities<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Every unauthorised tool is an entry point that your security team cannot see or protect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT applications typically lack the security controls that vetted enterprise tools are required to have. They may store data without proper encryption. They may not support multi-factor authentication. They may have misconfigured access permissions. And when employees leave your organisation, their access to these tools is rarely revoked, because IT never knew they existed in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of these applications expands your attack surface in ways that are completely invisible to the people responsible for defending it. Attackers do not need to breach your well-defended core systems if there is an unmonitored file-sharing app full of sensitive documents that nobody is watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average global cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. Shadow IT consistently features in post-breach investigations as an entry point or contributing factor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Compliance and Regulatory Failures<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Many industries operate under strict regulations that require organisations to know exactly where their data is, how it is processed, who can access it, and how long it is retained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT makes compliance impossible, not difficult, impossible. If a team member is storing client data in an unsanctioned cloud service hosted in a different jurisdiction, your organisation may be violating GDPR, HIPAA, or other applicable regulations without anyone realising it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under GDPR, organisations are required to report data breaches to authorities within 72 hours. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue. If the breach originated in a shadow IT tool, your compliance team may not even know there was a breach until long after that window has closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understanding the full scope of what is a data breach<\/strong><\/a> and how they originate is critical for organisations trying to get compliance under control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Hidden Costs and Financial Waste<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT is expensive in ways that rarely surface cleanly in any budget report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gartner estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30 to 40% of total IT spending in large organisations. That is money spent on tools that are not tracked, not negotiated at enterprise scale, not consolidated, and often duplicating functionality already available in approved systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Research by Productiv found that the average company wastes $135,000 annually on unnecessary or redundant SaaS tools. Much of that waste originates in shadow IT, where multiple teams independently adopt the same categories of tools without visibility into what already exists or what is already approved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Data Loss and Shadow Data<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT creates shadow data: sensitive corporate information stored in unmanaged, unmonitored locations that the organisation has no control over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When an employee shares a document via a personal cloud account, that document does not come back when they leave the company. When a team uses an unsanctioned messaging app for work discussions, those communications are not captured in your corporate data retention systems. When a developer stores credentials in a personal code repository, those credentials may be exposed without anyone ever knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow data is a natural byproduct of shadow IT, and it is one of the hardest aspects of the problem to quantify or recover from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>Shadow AI: The Fastest Growing Shadow IT Problem Right Now<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT has always been a challenge. In 2024 and 2025, it acquired a significantly more dangerous dimension: shadow AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The explosion of generative AI tools has created a new category of shadow IT that moves faster, reaches further, and carries higher risk than most traditional examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Employees are using AI tools, sometimes multiple different ones, to write content, summarise documents, analyse data, generate code, and process information. Company data, customer records, internal communications, and confidential strategic information are being pasted into systems the organisation has no visibility into and often no contractual protection over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to a Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index report, 78% of workers were already using personal AI tools at work in 2024, and the majority had not disclosed this to their employer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The security implications are serious. Data submitted to third-party AI systems may be used for model training, stored on external servers, or exposed through the platform’s own security vulnerabilities. Many free AI tools have limited or no enterprise data protection guarantees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ISACA’s 2025 research found that AI-associated data breach cases cost organisations more than $650,000 per incident above baseline breach costs. Shadow AI is not a future concern. It is already generating measurable financial damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For organisations that already grapple with attack surface management<\/strong><\/a>, shadow AI represents a rapidly expanding and largely invisible new frontier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>How Shadow IT Leads to Data Breaches<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Understanding the connection between shadow IT and data breaches is where the stakes become most concrete. Shadow IT does not cause breaches in one single way. It creates multiple distinct vulnerabilities simultaneously, most of them completely invisible to the people responsible for defending your organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Unpatched Vulnerabilities in Unmanaged Tools<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Approved software sits inside a managed security process. IT teams monitor for vulnerabilities, apply patches, and track the security status of every tool in the official stack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT tools sit completely outside that process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When a critical vulnerability is discovered in an application your IT team does not know exists, nobody receives the alert, nobody schedules the patch, and nobody fixes it. The vulnerability stays open indefinitely. Attackers who find it can exploit it at their leisure, with no race against a patch cycle to worry about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Credential Reuse Across Personal and Work Accounts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Employees signing up for shadow IT tools almost always use their work email address. Many also reuse passwords they have already used elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If those credentials appear in a breach of an entirely unrelated service and end up on a dark web marketplace<\/strong><\/a>, attackers now have working credentials for a tool that contains real company data. They did not need to hack anything. They simply logged in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is one of the most common and most preventable breach pathways, and it happens constantly through tools that IT never knew about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Data Exfiltration Through Trusted-Looking Channels<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Once an attacker gains access to a shadow IT tool that contains company data, extracting that data is straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The traffic looks like normal employee activity to any monitoring system watching the corporate network. There are no unusual commands, no suspicious file transfers, no alerts triggered. The data simply leaves through a channel that was never supposed to carry it in the first place, and nobody notices until long after it is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Orphaned Access After Employee Departure<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
When an employee leaves your organisation, IT runs through a deprovisioning checklist. Every system on that list gets access revoked. Shadow IT tools are never on the list because IT never knew they existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Former employees can retain access to company data stored in shadow systems for months or years after their departure. That access is live, functional, and completely unmonitored. Research by Stitchflow found that 53% of security breaches involve orphaned accounts belonging to former employees. Shadow IT is a significant contributor to that number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why Dark Web Monitoring Closes This Gap<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
No matter how well you manage shadow IT, some exposure will happen. Credentials from tools you did not know about will surface in breach databases. Data will appear in places it should not be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dark web monitoring<\/strong><\/a> is the safety net for exactly this scenario. When credentials from shadow IT tools appear in dark web forums and criminal marketplaces after a breach, continuous monitoring detects that exposure before attackers can act on it. That early warning is often the difference between a contained incident and a full-scale breach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can run a free check right now using a free email scanner<\/strong><\/a> to see whether your credentials are already circulating where they should not be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>How to Manage Shadow IT Without Killing Productivity<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The wrong response to shadow IT is a blanket prohibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Locking everything down frustrates the employees who are just trying to do their jobs well. It drives shadow IT underground rather than eliminating it, because the underlying need does not go away when the policy tightens. And it signals that IT is an obstacle to productivity rather than an enabler of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The right approach is visibility first, then fast and legitimate alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Start with an honest audit.<\/strong> You cannot manage what you cannot see. SaaS management and discovery tools can identify applications connecting to your corporate systems, including ones IT never approved. Start with a clear picture of what actually exists before deciding what to do about it. Most organisations are surprised by how many tools they find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Create a fast-track approval process.<\/strong> If the standard approval process takes three weeks, shadow IT will always be faster and more attractive. A streamlined, low-friction path for lower-risk tools with clear criteria removes the main incentive to bypass IT entirely. Speed of approval is a security control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Build and maintain an approved tool catalogue.<\/strong> Make it genuinely easy for employees to find vetted, approved alternatives to common shadow tools. If the sanctioned option does the job well, most employees will use it. If the catalogue is difficult to navigate or the tools in it are noticeably worse than what they can find themselves, they will not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Educate on why it matters, not just that it is policy.<\/strong> Employees who understand the compliance and security consequences of shadow IT make better decisions. Employees who have only been told it is against the rules look for workarounds. The goal is informed behaviour, not obedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Build proper offboarding controls.<\/strong> Deprovisioning access to approved tools at offboarding is standard practice. Deprovisioning shadow tools is harder, which is why 53% of security breaches involve orphaned accounts belonging to former employees. Any discovered shadow IT tool should be documented and included in the offboarding checklist from that point forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Extend monitoring to the dark web.<\/strong> Even with the best shadow IT management practices, employees will occasionally use tools that create exposure. DarkScout’s dark web monitoring<\/a> scans continuously for credentials and corporate data surfacing in breach databases, hacker forums, and criminal marketplaces. When a shadow IT tool your team never knew about becomes the source of a breach, that monitoring is what tells you before the damage escalates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Connecting shadow IT management to broader cybersecurity compliance<\/a> frameworks ensures the controls you put in place actually meet the regulatory requirements your organisation operates under.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>The Bottom Line<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Shadow IT is not a problem created by careless or malicious employees. It is a symptom of the gap between what people need to do their jobs well and what the official IT environment provides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The organisations that manage it most effectively are the ones that close that gap rather than try to enforce their way around it. That means genuinely useful approved tools, faster approval processes, honest visibility into what is actually in use, and monitoring systems that catch the consequences of exposure before they escalate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every unapproved tool is an entry point someone is not watching. That is the risk worth taking seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want to see how exposed your organisation already is, DarkScout monitors the dark web 24\/7<\/a> and alerts you the moment your credentials or data appear somewhere they should not be. Start with a free email scan<\/a> and find out what is already out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your employees are probably using apps and tools your IT team has never heard of. Not because they are trying to cause problems. They found something that works better than what they were given, signed up in two minutes using their work email, and got on with the job. It is practical, it is human, and it is happening in almost every organisation on earth. This is shadow IT. And while the intent is almost never malicious, the consequences can be. This guide covers exactly what shadow IT is, why it keeps happening despite every policy written to stop it, the real risks it creates for your organisation, and how to manage it in a way that actually works. What Is Shadow IT? Shadow IT refers to any hardware, software, application, or cloud service that employees use for work purposes without the knowledge or formal approval of the IT department. The “shadow” part is not about intent. It is about visibility. These tools operate completely outside the organisation’s official technology stack. That means IT cannot monitor them, security teams cannot protect them, compliance teams cannot assess them, and no one knows what data is flowing through them or where it ends up. The scale is much larger than most leaders expect. According to Gartner, 41% of enterprise employees were already using technology outside IT oversight in 2022. Gartner projects that figure will climb to 75% by 2027. Shadow IT is not an edge case or a niche problem in careless organisations. It is becoming the default state of most workplaces. Understanding it clearly is the first step to managing it properly. Common Examples of Shadow IT Shadow IT takes many forms. Some of it looks obviously risky. Most of it looks completely harmless on the surface. The common thread in all of these is that IT never knew they existed. Which means every risk those tools carry is a risk the organisation is absorbing completely blind. Why Does Shadow IT Keep Happening? Most organisations treat shadow IT as a discipline problem. It is not. It is a gap problem. Employees resort to unofficial tools because the official alternatives are not meeting their needs, and the system for getting those needs met is too slow. Understanding why it happens is the only way to address it in a way that actually works. The approved tools do not do the job. Official software is often selected for cost, compliance, or standardisation reasons rather than usability. The result is tools that are technically acceptable but practically frustrating. When 61% of employees report not being completely satisfied with the technologies their company provides, shadow IT fills the gap. The approval process takes too long. Research from JumpCloud found that only 12% of IT departments can keep pace with technology requests from the rest of the business. When a team needs a tool to hit a deadline this week and the approval process takes three weeks, they do not wait. They find their own solution and move on. Remote and hybrid work made the problem worse. When employees work from home, the natural friction of workplace norms disappears. The line between personal tools and work tools blurs. Personal devices, personal accounts, and personal software all move into the working day, often without anyone noticing. SaaS made it trivially easy. A generation ago, installing software meant involving IT. Today, anyone can sign up for a powerful SaaS platform in ninety seconds using their work email address, no credit card required, no IT involvement needed, no procurement process triggered. The barriers that once kept shadow IT contained have essentially disappeared. The answer to shadow IT is therefore not stricter enforcement. It is making the approved path genuinely easier than the shadow one. The Real Risks of Shadow IT The risks created by shadow IT are not theoretical. They show up in breach reports, compliance investigations, and financial audits every year. 1. Security Vulnerabilities Every unauthorised tool is an entry point that your security team cannot see or protect. Shadow IT applications typically lack the security controls that vetted enterprise tools are required to have. They may store data without proper encryption. They may not support multi-factor authentication. They may have misconfigured access permissions. And when employees leave your organisation, their access to these tools is rarely revoked, because IT never knew they existed in the first place. Each of these applications expands your attack surface in ways that are completely invisible to the people responsible for defending it. Attackers do not need to breach your well-defended core systems if there is an unmonitored file-sharing app full of sensitive documents that nobody is watching. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average global cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. Shadow IT consistently features in post-breach investigations as an entry point or contributing factor. 2. Compliance and Regulatory Failures Many industries operate under strict regulations that require organisations to know exactly where their data is, how it is processed, who can access it, and how long it is retained. Shadow IT makes compliance impossible, not difficult, impossible. If a team member is storing client data in an unsanctioned cloud service hosted in a different jurisdiction, your organisation may be violating GDPR, HIPAA, or other applicable regulations without anyone realising it. Under GDPR, organisations are required to report data breaches to authorities within 72 hours. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue. If the breach originated in a shadow IT tool, your compliance team may not even know there was a breach until long after that window has closed. Understanding the full scope of what is a data breach and how they originate is critical for organisations trying to get compliance under control. 3. Hidden Costs and Financial Waste Shadow IT is expensive in ways that rarely surface cleanly in any budget report. Gartner estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30 to 40% of total IT spending<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[21,41],"class_list":["post-2968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity","tag-shadow-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2973,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions\/2973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getdarkscout.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Browser Extensions<\/strong>: an employee installs some browser extensions to boost productivity, while this could have access to all data read by the browser, including private information of customers and the company’s dashboards and login credentials.<\/li>\n\n\n\n