Credential Abuse Is Still Doing the Damage

Credential-based attacks remain the most common entry point in confirmed breaches, particularly against cloud email, remote access tools, and SaaS admin portals. The pattern is familiar: phishing or token theft, followed by MFA fatigue or session hijacking, then quiet lateral movement inside trusted systems.

For MSPs and MSSPs, this matters because these attacks rarely look dramatic at first. They blend into normal login noise, generate low-priority alerts, and often bypass perimeter defenses entirely. When the compromise is discovered, the question from clients is not “how sophisticated was the attacker,” but “why didn’t we see this sooner?”

This also exposes a gap between controls and outcomes. Many environments technically have MFA, conditional access, and logging enabled, yet lack consistent review of sign-in anomalies, impossible travel, or token reuse across tenants. Attackers are exploiting that operational blind spot more than any single vulnerability.

Practical takeaway: Review how identity alerts are triaged today. If risky sign-ins, MFA push abuse, or OAuth app consent alerts are not reviewed daily, treat that as a coverage gap, not a tooling gap.

This is the type of risk MSPs and business leaders should be tracking daily.