Leverage Account Compromise Alerts to Combat Cyber Threats

Learn how account compromise alerts can shorten MSPs’ timeline for threat detection, categorize events based on priority and empower better customer protection.

Account Compromise Alerts

Account compromise: the bane of MSPs’ existence. And the threat isn’t going away any time soon.

Phishing and stolen or compromised credentials were two of the most prevalent attack vectors leading to account compromise, according to IBM’s 2023 “Cost of a Data Breach” report. These were also among the top four costliest incident types.  

Unfortunately, the news gets even worse. (“Worse than that?” you wonder.)

Yep: An account compromise usually flies under the radar for more than six months. According to the IBM report, it takes an average of 204 days to detect a cybersecurity breach. 

In 204 days, you could train for a marathon (or two), write a book or learn a pretty good chunk of a new language. 

And a hacker? Well, they can steal massive amounts of data (or money) in that time span. 

Shortening that timeline is an incredibly important piece of an MSP’s job — because the future of your clients’ organizations depends on it.

What Can Happen During an Account Compromise?

Pretty much anything. Hackers could jump into the account of your customer’s Head of Finance — then send fake invoices and trick the organization into paying the bill.

Bad actors could steal intellectual property or other sensitive files. 

If a hacker has infiltrated a Head of HR’s account, they could take employees’ personal information, like Social Security numbers or addresses. 

They could delete important documents and generally make a mess of any internal filing system. 

The list could go on: Hackers are creative. Your job is to keep them at bay.

Benefits of Prompt Account Compromise Alerts

Just like with medical maladies:

Early detection of an account compromise = damage prevention.

The faster you realize something is wrong, the faster you can treat the problem.

Think about what early detection could mean for your clients: 

  • More data protection: If an MSP can limit the amount of time a bad actor spends inside an account, the less time they’ll have to steal sensitive data.
  • Fraud prevention: Kicking a bad actor out of an account faster means they have less time to pretend they are that end user — and stir up trouble.
  • Reputation management: Massive account compromises and data loss reflect poorly on an organization, even if it wasn’t necessarily their fault. If you can snuff out a security breach quickly, you can cover their SaaS.
  • Less downtime for the end user: So they can get back to their work — instead of getting locked out of their account. 
  • Less cleanup time: So you can get back to your work.

What Can MSPs Do To Ensure Early Detection?

For every emergency, we have some kind of alert system: 

  • Smoke detectors for fires
  • Home security systems for burglars 
  • Tornado sirens for severe storms 

 

… and so on. 

What MSPs need is their own kind of tornado siren (hackers cause as much damage as a tornado — just virtually). 

To better protect your clients, their data and their finances, you need an early warning system.

At SaaS Alerts, we provide the tools to not only detect account compromises early — but also to define what an account compromise actually looks like for that organization

For example, maybe one of your customers has a flexible work-from-home policy where end users log in from all over the world. You can still keep an eye on those logins. But you know a foreign login isn’t always an immediate sign of mischief. 

Related: How MSPs Use IP Geolocation to Protect Clients

However, maybe another customer is a hospital — where all end users are logging in on-site. Naturally, a foreign login from an end user in that environment will set off a louder alarm. 

Being able to customize your alerts based on customer needs, geography and industry can be a critical strategy for early detection. 

How Account Compromise Alerts Work With SaaS Alerts

SaaS Alerts offers monitoring tools to flag suspicious activity — then sets off a notification process that both empowers quick action and helps prevent false positives. If you get a high-priority alert, you know it’s time for action. The others can wait.

The key to avoiding alert fatigue? Categorization

SaaS Alerts’ notifications fall into three buckets: 

  • Low: These aren’t worth waking up in the middle of the night for. They’re valuable for data collection but don’t require immediate action. 
  • Medium: This could be an indicator of a compromise — more so if several medium-priority alerts pop up in a row.
  • Critical: Get to a laptop, fast. An account has likely been compromised, and it’s time to jump into your incident response plan.

MSPs can proactively set up their own “indicators of compromise” for what an account compromise looks like. 

Then, through SaaS Alerts’ Respond module, you can set up automated remediation actions to eliminate the hacker’s access before a loss can occur.  

Read more about how this automatic remediation helped one of our partners shut down threats without lifting a finger.

For example, if an end-user account: 

  • Mistypes its password three times
  • From an unapproved foreign location
  • On an unknown device

… and then the fourth attempt is successful — well, that’s probably bad news. 

But SaaS Alerts can lock down the account immediately, based on these triggers alone. 

(And yes, that remediation still happens outside of working hours. You and your team can carry on with happy hours or sleeping schedules.)

“SaaS Alerts makes everything easier for MSPs because it’s designed for MSPs. It helps us cover our SaaS by keeping us on top of our clients’ security issues — so we can respond quickly at the times they need us most.”

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