The Unavoidable Truth: Why Zero-Trust is Mandatory After the Stellantis/Salesforce Breach

Every dealer principal must now accept this cold reality: no single security tool, firewall, or vendor contract can keep you 100% safe.

The recent Stellantis-Salesforce data breach is a perfect—and terrifying—example of a threat that bypassed traditional defenses entirely. The threat didn't come through the front door of Stellantis’ internal network (where systems like BYOS are deployed); it moved through the core of a CRM giant via a compromised third-party app.

The lesson is twofold:

1. You must adopt Zero-Trust principles for your SaaS environment (like strict token management and auditing).

2. You must ensure that when a threat does breach your perimeter—whether through the cloud or a phishing email—it hits a complete dead end before it reaches your DMS.

This requires a strategy that covers the human factor, the cloud, and the internal network.

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Quick Definition: Zero Trust

Zero Trust is a modern security philosophy based on one simple rule: "Never trust, always verify."

• Assume Breach: You operate as if an attacker is already inside your network or has your login.

• Verify Everything: Every single user, device, and application must be authenticated, authorized, and validated on an ongoing basis.

• Least-Privilege: Users (and third-party apps) are only given the absolute minimum access required for their task. If they don't need access to the DMS, they don't get it.

This philosophy is what allows Brightly Cyber to protect your cloud and your employees, and what makes the BYOS hardware so effective at your internal perimeter.

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Secure Your Cloud Perimeter

The Stellantis attack began with compromised OAuth tokens and social engineering. This is where Brightly Cyber's service model is critical. We provide the necessary defense layers above the network:

• Phishing-Resistant MFA & Training: Mitigate the human factor that allows initial credential theft.

• SaaS Auditing & Least-Privilege Access: We help implement the Zero-Trust principles needed to audit and tightly control third-party app permissions on platforms like Salesforce and CDK.

• Employee Protection: Our OBC program identifies and alerts staff to serious events, reducing the biggest risk vector: the employee.

This protects your data while it lives in the cloud.

Achieving Dealership Cyber Resilience: Stop Lateral Movement on Your Internal Network

While the Stellantis threat didn't hit Stellantis' internal perimeter, the next one will. All it takes is one successful phishing campaign or general ransomware attack landing on a workstation. The challenge then becomes lateral movement—the threat moving from one infected PC to your DMS.

This is the specific gap filled by BYOS.

The BYOS hardware solution makes your most critical assets (like your DMS and customer data servers) invisible to unauthorized scanning the moment a threat enters your network. By providing Asset Cloaking and preventing unauthorized lateral movement, you ensure that even if an attacker gets a foothold, they cannot find or access the valuable targets. It's the ultimate internal fail-safe, operating below the OS and independent of traditional firewalls.

A complete security strategy demands defense at every layer: the cloud, the employee, and the network.

Brightly Cyber provides the expertise and services to secure your cloud and your employees, and BYOS provides the hardware-enforced invisibility to protect your most critical internal assets.

For the ultimate dealership financial safety net, ask about Brightly Insurance's DMS Outage Insurance—the financial protection that pays out within 15 days if a prolonged DMS outage occurs.

Call us today for a No-Obligation Dealership Cyber Resilience Audit.