Upwork Enables Remote Work, Protecting Against Internal and External Threats
Upwork Inc. is a global marketplace connecting nearly a million clients to eighteen million freelancers all over the world. The company has been a leader in remote work for over two decades—a quality that’s removed geographical barriers and helped customers embrace flexibility.
The Challenges of Securing a Global Team
With a fully cloud-adopted environment and a distributed workforce, security was top-of-mind for Upwork. Especially given the widespread use of productivity platforms, it was essential to prevent oversharing of sensitive client data and corporate assets.
The InfoSec and GRC teams turned to the NIST framework to identify what gaps existed in their ability to respond to identity attacks. As they explored solutions, they prioritized getting full visibility into their remote workforce. An advanced threat detection capability was also top-of-mind for the team, so they could monitor both external and internal risks.
“Upwork has such a diverse and large pool of folks that are fully remote. To protect our employees all around the world, we needed to start with full visibility.” - Shawn Chakravarty, Senior Director
The Obsidian Security Solution
Traditionally, catching threats has a few challenges, including a lack of visibility into identities across SaaS and limited detection capabilities from traditional tools. Complicating it further, managing internal risks comes with the need to balance security with privacy. Upwork was especially keen to ensure appropriate access throughout the onboarding and offboarding flows.
Obsidian Security gave Upwork the most comprehensive visibility into these potential threats. Obsidian’s solution delivered high-fidelity alerts with a low false positive rate, something that SIEM and XDR solutions struggled to do. Because of Obsidian’s powerful identity-centric view, the Upwork team has started pivoting into the platform to help resolve investigations, no matter where the alert originally came from. The cherry on top? Obsidian was easily integrated into their SOAR, to accelerate threat response. This integration shortened response time 600 hours a month.
“Given Obsidian’s integration with our SOAR platform, we’re able to do a significant amount of automated response off the bat. We’ve saved an absolute ton of people hours through automation and data pulled from Obsidian."
Next on the Horizon
As a fully cloud-adopted environment, Upwork is shifting left to manage SaaS posture and reduce their blast radius. One aspect of this is enhancing their SaaS discovery capabilities by correlating security telemetry from the browser. The Upwork team is also leading the charge in exploring new security use cases with AI. By training their LLM with Obsidian threat detection data, they aim to unlock deeper insights and better protect their organization.
“We’re harnessing the power of generative AI to enhance our security capabilities. By integrating it with Obsidian identity threat data, we’re getting two big benefits. First, we’re streamlining our security workflows. Second, and maybe more critically, were gaining a broader view of existing threats. With Obsidian and our LLM working together to provide a complete summary of each identity in our environment, we’re better equipped to address threats when they arise.”
