What is Email Protection for MSPs?
Cyberattacks are on the rise, and email remains the most common threat vector. The primary email threats are spamming and phishing attacks.
It is easy to see why Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are such an attractive target for cybercriminals. Not only does a data breach potentially give cybercriminals access to an MSP’s entire email network, but it can also grant them access to the networks of all their clients. This “2-in-1” threat means MSPs are especially vulnerable to email security attacks.
However MSPs can safely keep email-borne threats outside their customers’ networks by using a professional MSP email protection solution – fully equipped to alleviate email risk, with inbound filtering to eliminate spam and protect against malware and phishing attacks, and outbound filtering to prevent sensitive data leaving customers’ organization.
Did You Know?
BEC incidents were reported in 2024
total losses amounted
the average cost to manage spam per person without an email filter
of all email is spam
Why MSPs need Email Protection?
Email is the most common form of business communication globally, employees worldwide spend a significant portion of their day composing, sending, receiving, reading, and managing email. That also means that a large amount of critical business data, including confidential payroll information and end-of-term reports, is passed through email servers.
It is therefore unsurprising that email is the most common attack platform for cybercriminals. Hacking email is a highly lucrative business, gaining access to an MSP’s network potentially provides access to a whole host of passwords, company financial information, and other critical info that is sent via email. A business shutdown due to a malware attack can lead to several days of lost business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs.
When offering fully managed service plans, the MSP assumes the risk of its customers’ networks. However, many MSPs still have not tapped into email protection software to protect both their clients' and their systems, and this leaves them highly vulnerable to attack.
Hackers have become highly sophisticated in their attempts to penetrate servers and, as a result, are extremely effective in bypassing basic email spam filters that are custom-built into most email accounts. These filters also only protect against previously known threats.
Instead, MSPs need to consider an advanced and effective email protection solution that scans for zero-day threats, provides advanced threat protection, and includes sandboxing capabilities.
"In 2024,1,442 BEC incidents were reported. Total losses amounted to approximately $2.77 billion, making BEC the second-costliest category of cyber-enabled fraud after investment scams "
Protecting Outbound Email
While the risks associated with inbound mail are well-documented, protecting outbound email also needs to form a key part of an MSP's toolkit. Harmful emails can be sent inadvertently, but there is also a very real threat of cybercriminals hacking into business email accounts and using them to send malicious emails. Suppose other spam filters catch your customers’ outgoing business emails and subsequently identified as spam, with their IP address potentially being blocked by spam detection agencies. In that case, this can result in a substantial loss of business, as well as a loss of credibility.
An MSP email protection solution with outbound scanning will identify any attempts to use your customer's business account to send spam email and block employees from sending emails that may have been infected with malware.
Finally, email protection for MSPs also provides opportunities for additional recurring revenue, which, in turn, boosts profitability. It enables MSPs to spend less time actively managing customers and dealing with malware-related issues. It also adds another vital string to an MSP’s bow when selling to new customers and upselling or cross-selling to the existing base.
Time is of the essence when it comes to protecting you and your customers from online threats.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are prime targets for cybercriminals due to potential access to both their own and clients' networks.
SpamTitan Email Protection for MSPs
When it comes to selecting an MSP email protection solution provider, there is no shortage of choices, but there are several key considerations MSPs need to make. Not all email protection solutions have been developed with MSPs firmly in mind, and many lack the features MSPs need, leading to numerous headaches down the line.
SpamTitan is an advanced email protection solution, specifically designed for MSPs, that enables MSPs and their customers to operate more efficiently while protecting their business emails and data. SpamTitan has been serving the MSP market since 1999, and as a result, is fully aware of the main MSP business requirements and their deployment preferences.
SpamTitan email protection for MSPs performs a multi-layered analysis of all incoming and outgoing emails, incorporating Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), Real-time Blackhole List (RBLs), Bayesian analysis, and more.
SpamTitan utilizes dual antivirus engines to block known malware from reaching end users’ inboxes. A Bitdefender-powered sandbox is employed for in-depth analysis of suspicious links and attachments, thereby preventing zero-day threats.
SpamTitan seamlessly plugs into Office 365 and is priced extremely competitively for MSPs. If you're worried about spam, phishing, malware, and zero-day attacks, then SpamTitan is the solution for you.
Why SpamTitan is the Perfect Choice for MSP Email Security
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Intuitive and extremely easy to set up.
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Real-time detection for threat analysis with 24×7 updates and protection.
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Zero-Day Threat Protection: Dual antivirus engines provide signature-based protection against 100% of known malware.
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Sandboxing: allows in-depth analysis of suspicious attachments to identify zero-day malware threats.
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Unlimited Number of Users and Domains: A fully scalable solution that allows domains to be entered and configured as a single file, enabling MSPs to migrate from an existing spam filtering solution without service interruptions. Per-domain administrators can be created for each hosted domain, allowing each administrator to manage specific elements of their email.
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Per Domain Reporting: A full suite of reports can be set up for each domain.
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Easy customization: Available as a full white label software solution, ready for MSP branding.
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Flexible Pricing Model: SpamTitan’s pricing model provides the flexibility service providers need to help MSPs manage changing seat counts. Monthly billing options are available.
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Cloud-based with no hardware or software required.
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Full outbound email protection.
How are MSPs handling the rise in phishing attacks?
MSPs are taking a multi-layered, proactive approach to handle the rise in phishing attacks. Since phishing is often the entry point for more serious threats like ransomware and Business Email Compromise (BEC), MSPs are ramping up efforts in these areas to protect customers.
Managed service providers (MSPs) are a high target for cybercriminals. Whether your organization provides networking, infrastructure, security, or application services, it is crucial to secure your business and data centers against business email compromise (BEC) attempts.
Business Email Compromise:
Understanding the dynamics of a BEC scam is essential for developing methods to protect a business from an attack. There are various types of BEC scams with financial targets focusing on invoices, gift cards, and bank transfers. However, one thing is sure: BEC scams are evolving in response to technological and cultural changes.
The Osterman study found the following trends in BEC scams:
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BEC attackers are concentrating on choosing specific targets rather than deploying mass phishing.
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BEC phishing is sophisticated and carefully composed. It avoids typical phishing tricks, such as malicious links, to evade detection by Security Email Gateways (SEGs). Additionally, SEGs are unable to utilize geolocation data, which is crucial in identifying sophisticated threats such as BEC.
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A lack of expected phishing signals has meant that conventional secure email gateways (SEGs) are unable to defend against BEC attacks. The recent ‘State of Email Security in 2025’ report by Osterman research & TitanHQ found that Exchange Online Protection (EOP) in Microsoft 365 failed to identify BEC attacks, incorrectly classifying them as “clean.”
BEC scammers are creating campaigns that are bucking the trends seen in previous untargeted mass phishing attacks. Modern BEC campaigns are more dynamic and real-time, using multiple channels to confuse and obfuscate intent. AI is being used to modify and adapt campaigns, thereby evading detection by conventional methods of protection.
Common BEC Scams You Must Understand
There are five common types of business email compromise scams that MSPs are vulnerable to, which are:
Email Accounts Compromise
In this type of BEC fraud, cybercriminals hack your business email account and use it to send emails to your vendors, requesting payments. These payments go into fake bank accounts instead of your company's account.
Impersonations
An impersonator will pretend to be a CEO or senior executive of an MSP and send an email to an individual.
For example, a cybercriminal will hack a CEO's email address and send an email to an employee in the finance department asking for a quick money transfer to a client’s account for an important business deal. The unsuspecting employee will oblige and execute the transfer.
Another example is sending out fake invoices to international suppliers acting as MSPs. Cyber attackers will act as a managed service provider, requesting suppliers to transfer funds, but the money will be directed to fake or fraudulent bank accounts.
An attacker can also pretend to be an attorney working for managed service providers and send an email to a junior-level employee requesting information for contracts and other financial details. The unsuspecting employee will fulfil the request and hand over the information that will be further used for other crimes. This is also known as spear phishing.
How Business Email Compromise Works?
BEC is a form of attack that utilizes various social engineering and impersonation tactics to trick unsuspecting employees of a managed service provider into divulging sensitive information. This form of fraud is difficult to detect, and you will typically only find out after the scam has been successful.
Hacking MSP's email accounts and creating lookalike emails and domain names are standard methods that criminals use to trick targets into complying with malicious requests.
For example, your company's name is ABC, and the domain you use is xyz.com. Therefore, your email is abc@xyz.com. The cybercriminal may play with words slightly and create a similar email address that resembles abc@xzy.com or abc@xyzz.com.
An unsuspecting employee working for MSP may read the email without verifying the domain and fulfill the email's request, potentially costing you thousands or millions of dollars.
In an EAC attempt, a cybercriminal gains access and control of your legitimate business address, and the consequences can be severe. Not only do they have access to your sensitive information and correspondences, but they can also use the legitimate email ID to send emails to business partners, vendors, and customers for financial fraud purposes.
“Over 1 in 5 MSPs lost money to BEC attacks in the last 12 months (research completed March 2025). The study concludes that “BEC attacks represent a major threat for organizations.”
Three Steps of a Business Email Compromise Scam
A BEC scam occurs in four stages, which are:
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The attackers will target specific individuals and start collecting information. Cyber attackers may use MSP's business contact directories and LinkedIn profiles of employees, or search other online portals for valuable contact information and email addresses.
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Once the attackers have a complete database of people they wish to target, they will send spam emails to all the email accounts containing malicious requests. This also includes impersonation, where attackers use lookalike emails of senior management to target employees working in critical business operations, such as payroll, HR, and finance.
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If the recipient does not suspect anything, this successful BEC attempt can result in financial losses and data breaches for managed service providers.
How to Prevent Business Email Compromise
If you are a managed service provider, you will need to implement several safeguards to prevent BEC and EAC attacks. As BEC and EAC target the email addresses, you must secure the following:
Your employees will play a vital role and serve as your first line of defense against BEC attacks. Therefore, you must train your employees to identify the following:
Checking the Email and Domain Names
Make it a habit first to check the email address and domain names. Managed service providers can avoid most fraud by simply verifying the email sender’s name and the domain from which it was sent. This is where you can use solutions such as domain authentication, email security, account protection, and content inspection solutions to identify potential BEC threats.
Emails Requesting Information in Confidentiality
Attackers would not want anyone to suspect a BEC attack or fraud attempt. Therefore, they would ask the recipient employee of a managed service provider to maintain the confidentiality of the request mentioned in the email. Any such request is a potential BEC scam.
Language Errors and Spelling Mistakes
You must always look out for spelling and grammatical errors in emails. The sentence structure seems off and feels as if it were written by a non-native speaker; however, it is most likely a false impression.
Request to Bypass Protocols
If a CEO or CFO sends an email to an employee to bypass protocols and carry out a task on an urgent basis, this is another red flag and must be treated as a business email compromise attack.
Unusual Requests from Senior Management Executives
Train your employees to question any unusual requests from senior management employees. For example, if an accountant receives an email from a CEO requesting immediate transfer of funds into a client's account. This is a red flag, and the recipient employee must treat it as a potential Business Email Compromise (BEC) or Email Account Compromise (EAC) attack.
"In 2024 68% of data breaches involved human error, such as falling for phishing scams "
Additional Tips to Prevent BEC Attacks
Some additional tips for managed service providers are as follows:
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Always be suspicious when dealing with emails requesting any information.
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Give your employees the confidence not to feel shy about asking for clarification or getting in touch personally to confirm the request from the alleged sender of the email.
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Always follow the rule; if something sounds fishy, it probably is.
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Cybercriminals will always try to instill a sense of urgency in the recipient to comply with the request immediately. The success of a BEC attack heavily relies on an MSP employee panicking and rushing to cater to the email's request. Therefore, you must train your employee to relax and think twice before fulfilling any request received via email.
Why BEC Attacks are a significant issue for MSPs?
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are a significant issue for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) because they pose both security risks to clients and reputational and financial risks to the MSP itself.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams have been referred to as the “$55 million scam” by the FBI. For any business, BEC scams are a significant concern. This attack is highly focused on financial theft and is increasingly successful. For example, the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) has identified BEC as one of the most financially damaging threats in the healthcare sector. Notably, small to medium-sized companies and MSPs are not exempt; a recent study from TitanHQ and Osterman Research found that over 1 in 5 MSPs (21.6%) lost money to BEC attacks in the last 12 months (research completed March 2025). The study concludes that “BEC attacks represent a major threat for organizations.”
BEC attacks may be a favorite of cybercriminals, but there are ways to prevent this costly crime.
BEC Prevention with PhishTitan
If you are a managed service provider without any BEC prevention protocols in place, we at TitanHQ can help. We offer PhishTitan, a comprehensive anti-phishing protection solution for M365. PhishTitan employs layers of analysis and machine learning (ML) models to detect phishing emails. Curated feeds identify malicious URLs.
PhishTitan is a next-generation phishing protection and remediation solution powered by TitanHQ. Our proprietary machine-learning algorithm integrates directly with Microsoft 365, catching and remediating sophisticated phishing attacks Microsoft misses. These sophisticated, zero-day attacks are currently being missed and are where the real damage occurs.
PhishTitan delivers unbeatable anti-phishing accuracy and minimal false-positive results using AI, curated threat intelligence feeds, and end-user feedback. With PhishTitan, you protect your customers against zero-day attacks through multi-faceted analysis of emails and time-of-click techniques.
With over 345 million paying users, Microsoft 365 is one of the most popular business application suites and has become a popular target for cybercriminals. MSPs must ensure they can offer their customers a multi-layered anti-phishing solution that is cost-effective and easy to manage.
PhishTitan delivers your clients best-in-class phishing protection for M365 by offering an additional layer of that catches sophisticated phishing and BEC attacks over and above Microsoft
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Curated threat intelligence data unmatched in visibility, coverage, and accuracy.
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Post-delivery remediation (PDR) allows you to remove all phishing emails from your user’s inbox, removing risk instantly. Our curated and unique email threat intelligence data is unmatched in visibility, coverage, and accuracy.
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URL analysis through numerous curated feeds to detect malicious destinations linked to phishing emails.
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Machine learning (ML) detection models that are very effective at adapting to new phishing tactics.
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Connecting through M365 APIs, PhishTitan offers effortless onboarding & simple management
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PhishTitan provides the capability for post-delivery remediation across multiple tenants in less than 10 minutes.
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Auto Remediation – Admins can choose to divert a malicious mail email directly to junk folder, providing an additional layer of risk mitigation and enhanced protection.
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Allow list – easily upload a list of trusted domains.
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Exploited domains - admins have the option to apply a banner to emails from free email services and alert users to be vigilant.
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Display Name Anti-Spoof, identifying spoofing attempts with a warning banner.
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Threat Coach – using AI to identify the parts of a phishing mail that are indicative of malicious content.
TitanHQ CyberSecurity Platform
TitanHQ is dedicated to providing MSPs with purpose-built AI-assisted email security technology. Our CyberSecurity Platform is based on the following capabilities:
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LLM and AI analysis of emails
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Auto Remediation to eliminate threats from users’ inboxes
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Advanced M365 security to augment existing native SEGs. Offers native and API-based integration
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Real-time analysis and threat assessment to identify intent and spot sophisticated BEC messages
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Integrated behaviour-led security awareness training that offers hyper-personalized training
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Simplify license management across all services
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Global dashboard allowing management of unified solutions
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Unified billing and contracts
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Rapid and flexible scalability
The combination of AI-assisted email security technology and security awareness training provides MSPs and their clients with a competitive edge in identifying and stopping BEC campaigns.
How prepared are your SMB clients for today’s email threats?
TitanHQ's cost-effective, intuitive, and easy-to-use email security solutions provide world-class AI-powered threat detection, enabling your team to focus on higher-level tasks that drive business growth. Our team of experts will help you achieve scale and recurring revenue.
Susan Morrow
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Many sophisticated cyber-attacks specifically target SMBs. SMBs need advanced protection from these attacks. MSPs can help meet the security needs of their SMB customers by offering advanced MSP email security services that are extremely effective at protecting end users from the most malicious email and web threats – namely phishing attacks and ransomware.
SpamTitan is an advanced email filtering service for MSPs. It enables MSPs to keep email borne threats outside their customers network. SpamTitan allows the MSP to alleviate email risk, with inbound filtering to eliminate spam and protect against malware, viruses, phishing, ransomware and sophisticated social engineering attacks, and outbound filtering to prevent sensitive data leaving customers’ organization.
MSPs are a vital element of the global supply chain with clients across all verticals such as retail, wholesale, and critical infrastructure. MSPs are an attractive target for cybercriminals. If a cyber attack is successful and access to MSP systems is achieved, then cybercriminals have access to their entire network of clients. A compromise in one MSP can have a domino effect downstream if not adequately mitigated.
Advanced phishing protection for MSPs is now essential as cyber-attacks on MSPs using phishing and spear-phishing are rising and increasingly successful. With over 92% of malware delivered by email, MSPs should ensure their customers have an advanced email protection layer in place to protect against phishing and ransomware threats.
The email boxes of MSPs are under attack. It only takes a simple mouse click to either destroy one’s reputation or infect dozens of customers. MSPs need to take action to protect themselves and their customers from these attacks. Many SMBs lack the internal resources to block these threats and turn to MSPs to provide the security they need including spam filtering.
MSP Email Protection Solutions help MSPs assume the risk of their clients' networks by offering advanced threat protection, including zero-day threat detection and sandboxing. This not only enhances security but also allows MSPs to offer a higher level of service to their clients.
While inbound email risks are well-known, protecting outbound email is equally crucial. This prevents harmful emails from being sent inadvertently and guards against cybercriminals hacking into business email accounts to send malicious emails. It also helps maintain the credibility of the sender's domain.
SpamTitan is an advanced email protection solution specifically developed for MSPs. It provides multi-layered analysis of emails, utilizing various techniques like SPF, DMARC, RBLs, Bayesian analysis, and dual antivirus engines (Bitdefender and ClamAV) to deliver robust protection.
SpamTitan offers: Intuitive and easy setup, Real-time threat detection with 24x7 updates, Sandboxing for zero-day threat identification, Scalability for an unlimited number of users and domains, Flexible pricing model and monthly billing options, Cloud-based deployment and much more.
Yes, you can! We offer a free trial of SpamTitan so you can experience its advanced email protection features firsthand.
SpamTitan Plus is an advanced phishing protection solution that includes A.I. driven click-time anti-phishing protection. It enhances defense against phishing, business email compromise, and zero-day attacks by neutralizing malicious links in emails.
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