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Articles by James Savard
Five layers of a 2026 phish, two studies three years apart, and the tells that replaced the ones you were taught. In October 2022, Osterman Research published a study we commissioned, The Business Cost of Phishing. It created a baseline for us to use as a pulse check on how phishing impacts organizations. A security team spent 27.5 minutes on every phishing email, from first sight to full removal, at a cost of $31.32 per message.
The Send Button Safety Net: IRONSCALES Email Encryption
Over the past three months, I’ve written about outbound email from three different angles. First, the compliance cliff: the widening gap between what regulators expect of sensitive data in transit and what most security stacks actually deliver. Then, what architectural encryption should look like when you design it for a regulatory environment that changes by the quarter. And most recently, what opens up for MSPs when encryption finally stops fighting the multitenant business model.
Where Does the MSP Fit in a Client’s Cyber Insurance Process
Cyber insurance is a polarizing topic among MSPs and their clients. Its perceived value, coupled with the often-painful renewal process and escalating premiums, has turned this type of coverage into a matter of preference rather than necessity for many organizations. As your business directly manages the IT infrastructure and cybersecurity of your clients, your role directly influences the claims process, responsibilities, and liabilities provided under these coverages.
AI Fighting AI: A New Era in Cybersecurity for MSPs and MSSPs
By 2025, cybercrime costs are projected to hit $12 trillion annually, with AI-driven phishing campaigns playing a significant role according to Forrester’s 2025 Predictions report. It’s easy to dismiss AI as the latest buzzword and light the torches to chase it out of town. But understanding its impact—both good and bad—is critical for MSPs. The Double-Edged Sword Why is AI-driven crime so costly?
Four MSP Outcomes That Open When Email Encryption Finally Runs at Scale
If you’ve spent any time managing email security across a book of MSP clients, you already know encryption can quickly turn into a headache. Over the past decade, the MSP service catalog has expanded faster than most operating models could absorb. Every new attack surface and every new compliance regime arrived with its own console, its own tenant configuration, and its own per-client setup burden. ConnectWise’s 2025 MSP Threat Report named tool sprawl a top contributor to technician burnout.
IRONSCALES, Anthropic, and What it Means for the Future
The post IRONSCALES, Anthropic, and What it Means for the Future appeared first on Blog. For as long as there has been email security, attackers (the bad guys) have moved faster than the people defending against them (the good guys). They iterate in the open, trade techniques in public forums (inside and outside the dark web), and build on each other’s tooling without the safety constraints that legitimate defenders operate within.
Architectural Encryption Designed For Every Organization
The post Architectural Encryption Designed For Every Organization appeared first on Blog. A month ago, I wrote about the compliance cliff. The widening gap between what regulators expect of outbound email and what most security stacks actually deliver. The thesis was simple. Inbound detection has matured while outbound protection has not. And the regulatory floor keeps rising under both. If you read the last piece, you already know why this matters.
The Compliance Cliff: Email Encryption and Data Security Unpacked
It usually starts with a question nobody wants to ask out loud: “What happens when we send something we shouldn’t?” or worse. “What happens if I sent something sensitive to someone on accident?” Every organization has invested in stopping threats from getting in. Phishing filters, behavioral AI, security awareness training, maybe even a comprehensive Email Security platform sitting on top of M365. Good. That side of the equation has matured significantly over the last decade.
Canada's Data Sovereignty Question Answered with Dedicated Data Center
If you support Canadian customers in regulated industries, you have likely run into the requirement early in the evaluation process: data must stay in Canada. It’s not a preference, and in many evaluations it determines whether a security project moves forward at all. When there is uncertainty about where customer data is stored and processed, procurement slows, privacy reviews expand, and timelines drift.
Ready to Move On: How to Evaluate, Select, and Deploy Modern Email Security
Part 4 of a 4-Part Series: The SEG Breakup Guide for MSPs Take a deep breath. You’ve done the hard part. You looked at the data in Part 2 and saw what’s getting through your SEG every month. You ran the numbers in Part 3 and accepted what staying is actually costing you. Now comes the part that changes something. This final post is a practical guide to evaluating modern email security, asking the right questions, and making a transition that holds up under pressure.
The Relationship Tax: What Staying With Your SEG Is Really Costing Your MSP
Part 3 of a 4-Part Series: The SEG Breakup Guide for MSPs Every technology decision has a price. You pay for reliable infrastructure because downtime costs more. You invest in good RMM tools because managing clients manually doesn’t scale. You budget for security stack components because unprotected clients don’t stay clients for long.
Love is Blind, But Your SEG Gap Analysis Shouldn't Be
Part 2 of a 4-Part Series: The SEG Breakup Guide for MSPs You know that feeling when you see another MSP at a conference, and they’re genuinely excited about their email security? They’re not complaining about quarantine queues or late-night remediation calls. They’re talking about growth, taking on new clients, actually having time for strategic work. And you think: maybe things could be better for me. That thought doesn’t go away.
IRONSCALES Earns the ConnectWise PSA Blue Checkmark
MSPs do not need another security tool that lives in its own tab, demands manual updates, and creates more swivel-chair work for techs. The tools that stick are the ones that snap into the systems you already run your business on. That is why we are excited to share that IRONSCALES is now ConnectWise PSA Certified, marked by the Blue Checkmark in the ConnectWise Marketplace.
It's Not Me, It's You: Why This Year Feels Different
Something changed this year. It might have happened at that partner event in January when you caught yourself comparing notes with another MSP owner. They weren’t complaining about their email security. At all. Instead, they were talking about expansion plans and new service tiers and actually having time to focus on business development. Or it was during that client call two weeks ago when you had to explain why another sophisticated phishing email made it through your defenses. Again.
The 2025 Phishing Surge Proved One Thing: Chasing Doesn't Work
Let’s get something out of the way: retrospectives can feel a bit like mandatory fun. Someone gathers up the year’s events, packages them into neat categories, and delivers “key takeaways” that land somewhere between obvious and forgettable. This is not that. 2025 was the year phishing stopped being a nuisance and became a profession. Not in a good way.
MSP QBRs Are Shifting to Risk Reviews and Perspective is Key
As most MSPs gear up for the 2026 QBR season, the instinct is familiar. Pull the reports. Stack the metrics. Show the progress. Yet according to the MSP Global State of the Industry Report in 2025, more than two-thirds of MSPs say their clients expect them to play a strategic role in cybersecurity and risk management, not just technology operations. That single data point should give every MSP pause before recycling last year’s QBR format.
Five Phishing Red Flags to Remember This Holiday Season
Holiday phishing is not a “carelessness” problem. It’s a timing problem. One rushed click can have outsized consequences: a stolen password, a compromised account, or malware installed in seconds. During the holidays, attackers count on high volumes of shipping notices, receipts, and travel updates to make a fake message feel ordinary. From a personal perspective, a single click can trigger serious fallout.
From Compromise to Control: The ATO Prevention Plan for 2026
According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, breaches initiated with stolen credentials take an average of 246 days to identify and contain. That is more than eight months of undetected access. Eight months of reconnaissance. Eight months of quietly learning how your organization communicates, who approves payments, how vendors are onboarded, and where trust is assumed rather than verified. Account takeovers do not announce themselves. They blend in.
MSP Automation Isn’t Optional, But it Isn’t the Answer to Everything
Raise your hand if you’ve fallen victim to a vendor-led conversation around their latest AI-driven platform over the past calendar year. Keep it up if the pitch leaned on “next-gen,” “market-shaping,” or “best-in-class” while they nudged another product into your stack. If your hand is still up, you are not alone. MSPs are the target because you sit between shrinking budgets and rising risk. The right automation helps you scale.
Bridging Two Security Cultures: How IRONSCALES Supports MSP M&A
Canalys set the stage earlier this year with expected merger and acquisition activity in the MSP space to grow by about 45 percent in 2025, with managed services revenue reaching roughly $595 billion dollars globally. Looking back in retrospect, it’s tough to argue with the firm. That is a lot of integration work, board decks, and operational change for MSPs, MSSPs, and their customers, all while attackers look for missteps. Mergers and acquisitions are designed to change everything at once.
From Compromise to Control: An MSP Guide to Account Takeovers
ATOs are the new BEC. We’re seeing it on our end and other companies have certainly taken notice. Attackers compromised 6.2 million customer accounts across 1,027 large organizations in 2024 according to Kasada’s 2025 Account Takeover Attack Trends Report, underscoring how routine ATO incidents have become for enterprise brands. Many of these compromises start with email and stolen credentials.
Stop Checking The Box and Switch Your SAT Perspective
Too often Security Awareness Training (SAT) is viewed as a box. Why not treat it as an enablement tool that helps employees understand the macro cybersecurity landscape and jump into their next call more prepared? What if security awareness training was actually (hear me out) interesting? Done right, it reduces dwell time, cuts manual cleanup, and gives you hours back every week.
The Correlation Between MSP Growth and Proper Client Prospecting
What deems a prospect good or bad for your business? It depends on where your MSP is in its journey. If you are early and building a book of business, you will take on most clients and learn fast. Volume teaches repeatable delivery, exposes gaps in process, and funds the tools you actually need. Just keep the scope clear and price for the time you will spend. Once you are past that stage, a worthwhile prospect looks different.
MSPs, SMBs, and The Ripple Effect of a Leaner CISA
Revisiting my peer’s May 2025 Dark Reading article, Audian Paxson warned that cuts to CISA would weaken the public-private connective tissue, leading to slower advisories, fewer briefings, fragmented standards, and reduced information sharing, with smaller organizations (SMBs) hit hardest. Unfortunately, we are now seeing this play out.
Email Security and Compliance: What MSPs Need to Know in 2026
Earlier this year, we explored the widening gap between email security and compliance. It’s a gap that exists not because the threats are unclear or the risks misunderstood, but because the language of regulation still struggles to catch up with the speed and subtlety of modern phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks. For CISOs, IT Directors, and MSP leaders, that gap is no longer theoretical—it’s where legal exposure lives.
Cyber Insurance in 2026: What to Prioritize and How IRONSCALES Helps
Cyber insurers have shifted decisively to technical underwriting. Your controls, evidence, and time‑to‑respond now drive both insurability and price. Requirements most frequently called out in 2025 include phishing‑resistant MFA, 24/7 EDR with active response, incident response readiness with proof of testing, third‑party risk oversight, and mailbox‑level email security that can detect social‑engineering/BEC attacks.
When One Phish Poisons the Pipeline: Supply Chain Phishing on the Rise
Modern supply chains run on code, models, and email. The last one is still the easiest way to start a very bad day. In early September, attackers used a convincing “npm support” email to phish a maintainer, reset 2FA, and push malicious releases to 18 JavaScript packages with roughly 2 billion weekly downloads. The injected code hijacked browser wallet interactions to redirect crypto transactions. The phishing email appeared to come from [email protected].
Healthcare Under Siege: Your Email Security Needs a New Strategy
If you haven’t given your Healthcare IT teammate a hug or a high five lately, you owe them one. Healthcare IT Admins are fighting a war on multiple fronts. While you’re managing digital transformation, ensuring uptime for critical care systems, and navigating complex compliance requirements, threat actors have fundamentally changed their playbook. The result? Healthcare organizations are experiencing some of the most devastating and costly breaches on record—with email as the primary attack vector.
Supply Chain Security Starts From Within the Inbox
Picture this: Accounts Payable gets a “new remittance instructions” email from a frequent supplier. The sender name is right, the thread is a real PO reply‑chain, and the tone mirrors past messages. A shift supervisor is warning about line‑down risk. It looks safe because it feels familiar. Believability comes from context: trusted names and domains, realistic timing, real subject lines, and language lifted from prior exchanges.
From Static Workflows to Agentic AI: The Evolution of MSP Operations
The Shift That’s Already Here Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have always relied on efficiency. Scaling services across dozens—or hundreds—of client environments meant standardization, repeatable processes, and automation. For a long time, that meant robotic process automation (RPA) and, later, professional services automation (PSA) tools. But the operating environment has changed.
Microsoft and IRONSCALES Crack Down on the Direct Send Exploit
Back in Part 1, we walked through how attackers are using Microsoft 365’s Direct Send feature to spoof internal emails, making those messages look like they’re coming from a trusted domain. Now, Microsoft is tightening the screws with new controls and clearer guidance on how to shut that door before someone walks through it. This post breaks down what’s changed, what you need to do, and how to keep legitimate mail flowing while keeping the bad actors out. What’s New from Microsoft?
U.K. Home Office Impersonation: A Protection Playbook for Sponser-Licensed Orgs
UK organizations with sponsor licenses are now targets in a credential-harvesting phishing campaign. This campaign impersonates the UK Home Office and mimics the Sponsor Management System (SMS) login to steal usernames and passwords. Once attackers gain access, they can issue fraudulent Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS), exploit sensitive immigration workflows, or extort compromised users. This attack is not technically groundbreaking. It is psychologically clever.
Deepfake Detection: What is Phishing 3.0 and How Can You Prepare?
Earlier this year we warned that trust was cracking inside the inbox. Since then your inbox learned a new trick: acting. GenAI no longer just writes the lure; it manufactures the sender. With a few seconds of audio or a handful of images, attackers clone familiar voices and faces and insert them into everyday workflows: email threads, calendar invites, voicemails, quick chat notes. It looks routine because it comes through the tools you already trust.
From Vision to Reality: IRONSCALES + Malwarebytes Elevate MSP Security
When we first teamed up with Malwarebytes, the goal was ambitious but straightforward: give Managed Service Providers (MSPs) a single, streamlined way to deliver true defense in depth for their customers. That meant uniting industry-leading endpoint protection with adaptive, inbox-level email security so threats could be stopped earlier, remediated faster, and managed without adding complexity.
Inside Job: Attackers Are Spoofing Emails with M365’s Direct Send
Over the past three months, our threat analysts have noticed a significant spike in attackers abusing Microsoft 365’s Direct Send feature—a tool intended for devices like printers or scanners to send internal emails without authentication. Unfortunately, threat actors have found a way to exploit this convenience, slipping past critical email security checks like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
The MSP M&A Surge: How to Prepare for All Possibilities
The managed services M&A market is seeing a big jump in activity. Every week, I hear from partners navigating mergers, private equity deals, or strategic exits. According to MSP Business Insights, M&A activity in the MSP channel grew 50% in 2024, returning to 60% of 2021 levels, and early indicators suggest 2025 will surpass even those figures. Why is this happening? Demand is shifting.
3 Reasons to Visit IRONSCALES at Pax8 Beyond 2025
Pax8 Beyond is far from your average MSP conference. It’s the premier event for MSP professionals who want to learn, collaborate, and walk away with actionable insights to grow their business. From hands-on tech labs to game-changing breakout sessions and peer-led panels, Beyond attracts the MSPs, MSSPs, and IT pros who are redefining how modern businesses stay secure, productive, and profitable. This year’s agenda is stacked and IRONSCALES is right in the middle of it all.
Moving On Has Never Been So Simple: MSPs & ICES Solutions (Part 3)
Every tech stack has its “we need to talk” moment, and for most MSPs, it comes right after your SEG lets a phish waltz into a client’s inbox like it owns the place. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve had that moment. Whether it was a missed spoof, a flood of false positives, or the daily drag of managing outdated allowlists, you’ve seen firsthand that perimeter-based security is stuck in 2013. Let’s be honest: tuning legacy SEGs is like trying to patch a leaky roof in a hurricane.
Modern Threats, Missed Phish: How Exposed Are You? (Part 2)
Alright, you’ve come this far. You’ve admitted that your SEG isn’t exactly the security soulmate you thought it was. Maybe you’ve even started to notice the red flags – missed phishes, frustrated clients, constant rule tuning. But breaking up is a process, and before you can move on to something better, it’s important to assess the current state of the relationship.
DMARC’s Future: Ignoring Email Authentication is No Longer an Option
If you caught our recent post, What Microsoft’s New DMARC Policy Means for High-Volume Senders, you’re already familiar with the major changes Microsoft has made to tighten DMARC enforcement as of May 5, 2025. As a reminder, any mass sender (sending over 5,000 emails per day) without proper DMARC alignment will be outright rejected by outlook from now on. But let’s be clear, this isn’t the start of the DMARC tightening trend.
It’s Not Your MSP, It’s Your SEG: Email Security History 101 (Part 1)
It usually starts small—a missed phish here, a lost customer email in the quarantine abyss. Maybe a few grumbles from your support team about never-ending rule updates. At first, you let it slide. You think, ‘That’s just how it goes’; you convince yourself that every relationship has its rough patches. But over time, the cracks spread. You start questioning why you’re spending so much time managing something that seems more interested in making your life difficult than keeping your clients safe.
PSA: What Microsoft's New DMARC Policy Means for High-Volume Senders
Microsoft has recently announced a key update to its DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) policy for high-volume senders. This policy, which is already being enforced as of May 5, 2025—three days ago at the time of this blog’s publication—aims to enhance email security and reduce the impact of phishing and spoofing attacks for its outlook.com users.
IRONSCALES + Sherweb: Delivering Smarter, Scalable MSP Email Security
We’re proud to announce our new partnership with Sherweb, a leading cloud solutions provider trusted by over 7,000 MSPs and 85,000 businesses across North America. This collaboration brings IRONSCALES self-learning, AI-driven email security platform directly to Sherweb’s marketplace making it easier than ever for managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver modern phishing protection that adapts to today’s evolving threats.
Phishing 3.0: Trust, Deepfakes, and Why Your Inbox Might Betray You
In his recent post, our CEO, Eyal Benishti, sounded the phishing alarm for all to hear. The message? The traditional foundation of digital business communication, trust, is collapsing under the weight of AI-driven attacks. For years, businesses operated under the assumption that if an email looked professional or a voice sounded familiar, it could be trusted. But in today’s world of AI-generated deepfakes and hyper-realistic impersonations, that basic trust assumption is no longer safe.
Reimagining SAT For MSPs: From Static Lessons to Smart Defense
For most MSPs, Security Awareness Training (SAT) is an unavoidable part of the service stack, but let’s be honest, it often feels more like a recurring project than a meaningful security strategy. You’re managing multiple client environments, juggling regulatory compliance, and trying to prove value while working with outdated training platforms that weren’t built for your reality.
Phishing Simulation Testing Archives
Reimagining SAT For MSPs: From Static Lessons to Smart Defense For most MSPs, Security Awareness Training (SAT) is an unavoidable part of the service stack, but let’s be honest, it often feels more like a recurring project than a meaningful security strategy ...
Seeing the Big Picture in Phishing Defense: IRONSCALES & CrowdStrike
At the start of this year, IRONSCALES launched an integration with CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM, delivering enhanced threat visibility, detection, and correlation to help organizations combat phishing and account takeover (ATO) threats. This integration reflects our shared commitment to simplifying and strengthening cross-domain security—including email security—as a critical part of modern cyber defense.
James Savard
Seeing the Big Picture in Phishing Defense: IRONSCALES & CrowdStrike | | account takeover, bec, Phishing At the start of this year, IRONSCALES launched an integration with CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM, delivering enhanced threat visibility, detection, and correlation to help organizations combat phishing and account takeover (ATO) threats. This integration reflects our shared commitment to simplifying and strengthening cross-domain security—including email security—as a critical part of ...
Devious Deepfakes and Your Email Security Implications
Synthetic media isn’t just something out of the 1984 classic The Terminator anymore. As deepfake technology becomes more accessible and convincing, criminals are weaponizing it to craft persuasive content that easily bypasses traditional email security defenses. With the line between real and fake increasingly blurred, you might be asking yourself, “How big of an issue is this?” Well, that is exactly what we’re going to unpack in this blog.
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