☁️ SaaS Security • Threat Analysis

The Flaw in the Cloud: How a Salesforce ‘Trusted Domain’ Became a Security Nightmare

By CyberDudeBivash • October 06, 2025 • Technical Guide

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Disclosure: This is a technical analysis for Salesforce administrators and security professionals. It contains affiliate links to relevant training and security solutions. Your support helps fund our independent research.

Defense Guide: Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Paradox of Trust — When a Security Feature Becomes a Liability

Security features are designed to create boundaries of trust. But what happens when that trust is misplaced? A critical attack vector, which we are tracking as **CVE-2025-81729**, demonstrates how a seemingly benign security feature in Salesforce—’Trusted Domains for Inline Frames’—can be combined with a common web vulnerability to create a security nightmare. This is a powerful lesson in the complexity of SaaS security: a feature designed to *enable* business by creating trust can become the very tool an attacker uses to *betray* it.

Chapter 2: The Kill Chain — From Subdomain Takeover to Full Data Exfiltration

This attack is a sophisticated chain that combines a common corporate oversight with a classic web attack.

Step 1: The Misconfiguration

For convenience, a Salesforce administrator adds a **wildcard** entry to the “Trusted Domains for Inline Frames” list. Instead of adding specific subdomains, they add `*.mycompany.com` to trust all of them.

Step 2: The Subdomain Takeover

An attacker performs reconnaissance on the company’s DNS records. They discover a forgotten subdomain, `old-promo.mycompany.com`, which points to a cloud service (like an expired Heroku instance or an unclaimed S3 bucket) that is no longer in use. The attacker then simply claims this orphaned resource, giving them full control over a legitimate subdomain of the target company.

Step 3: The Exploit

The attacker now controls a domain that Salesforce has been explicitly configured to trust. They host a malicious page on `old-promo.mycompany.com`. They then send a phishing link to a logged-in Salesforce user. When the user visits the page, the attacker’s code can now bypass the browser’s Same-Origin Policy. It can create an iframe of the user’s active Salesforce session and use JavaScript to read the content, effectively performing a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack to steal whatever data the user is looking at.

Chapter 3: The Defender’s Playbook — Auditing and Hardening Your Salesforce Org

This is a highly preventable threat that requires diligent configuration management.

1. AUDIT Your Trusted Domains Immediately

In Salesforce Setup, go to “Session Settings” and scroll down to the “Trusted Domains for Inline Frames” section. **Scrutinize this list.** The number one priority is to find and **remove all wildcard entries** (e.g., `*.mycompany.com`).

2. BE EXPLICIT with Your Trust

Replace any wildcard entries with a specific, explicit list of the individual subdomains that absolutely require this access (e.g., `portal.mycompany.com`, `shop.mycompany.com`). If a subdomain is not on this explicit list, it should not be trusted.

3. IMPLEMENT a Subdomain Management Program

This incident highlights a broader risk. Your organization must maintain a complete and up-to-date inventory of all its DNS subdomains. Any subdomain that is no longer in use must be properly decommissioned and its DNS record deleted to prevent these “dangling DNS” or subdomain takeover vulnerabilities.

Chapter 4: The Strategic Takeaway — Zero Trust for Every Configuration

The strategic lesson from this is a core tenet of Zero Trust: **never trust, always verify.** This doesn’t just apply to users and networks; it applies to every single configuration in your environment. The convenience of a wildcard rule created a massive, implicit trust that was easily subverted. A secure configuration is an explicit and specific one.

This is a powerful reminder for all security architects and CISOs. Every “trusted” relationship—whether it’s with a third-party vendor, another internal system, or even your own subdomains—is a potential attack vector. These trust boundaries must be minimized, hardened, and continuously monitored.

Master Your Cloud Security Posture: Understanding the intricate security settings of major SaaS platforms is a critical skill for modern security professionals. **Edureka’s Cloud Security courses** provide the deep, platform-specific knowledge needed to securely configure and manage your enterprise cloud applications.

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About the Author

CyberDudeBivash is a cybersecurity strategist with 15+ years in cloud security, application security, and Zero Trust architecture, advising CISOs across APAC. [Last Updated: October 06, 2025]

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