Most security tooling is built to stop someone from getting in. Business email compromise sidesteps that entirely. The attacker already has working credentials, taken through a phishing page that captured a live session, or a stolen token that let them skip multi-factor authentication altogether. From the perspective of your tenant, nothing unusual has happened. Someone logged in.

What follows is quiet. Mailbox rules that move specific messages out of sight. Reading through invoicing and banking threads. Watching how your organization talks about money, and to whom. By the time an attack becomes visible, the attacker has usually been present for weeks.

Standard Microsoft 365 alerting is not built to surface this. It flags impossible travel and unfamiliar sign-in locations, which sophisticated attackers plan around. What it does not do well is interpret behavior: what an account is actually doing across email and file activity once it is inside, and whether that pattern looks like the person who owns it.

This is a focused detection engagement, not a broad security assessment. We connect identity threat detection capability to your Microsoft 365 tenant and analyze sign-in records, mailbox configuration, message metadata, and connection characteristics to determine whether an account in your environment is under an attacker’s control.

The most common objection to letting an outside firm into a mail environment is the obvious one. Nobody wants a vendor reading their correspondence, and in a regulated firm, letting one do so may not even be permissible.

This engagement does not read the body of your messages. It analyzes log records, sign-in data, mailbox configuration, forwarding and inbox rules, message metadata, and the characteristics of the connections reaching your tenant. Message metadata includes who sent a message, who received it, when, and the subject line. It does not include the body of the message or its attachments, and it does not touch SharePoint or OneDrive at all.

We are specific about subject lines because they matter. A subject line can carry a client name, an account number, or a matter description, and if your firm is regulated you need to know that before you authorize anything rather than after. We tell you plainly for that reason.

The limit is not something we work around. It is how the detection works. A compromised account gives itself away through behavior: a rule that quietly moves messages from one sender into an archive folder, a session originating from residential proxy infrastructure, a token used from somewhere the account has never authenticated before. None of that requires reading what was written.

This is a one-time engagement. It looks at your tenant as it is today, and back through the log history available to us, and it tells you what is there. It is not a monitoring service and we are not going to describe it as one.

That is worth being clear about, because the value of a one-time look is real but specific. Most organizations have never had anyone examine their Microsoft 365 environment for signs of compromise. They do not know whether something is happening right now, and they have no record of what their environment looked like when it was presumably healthy. This engagement answers the first question and creates the second.

That second part matters more than it sounds. You cannot recognize abnormal without knowing what normal looked like. A baseline is what makes the next look meaningful, whether that next look is ours or someone else’s.

What it does not do is tell you about next month. If a credential is phished in six weeks, this report will not know. Organizations that need to know continuously need continuous monitoring, and that is a different conversation we are glad to have once you know where you stand today.

This engagement identifies whether a compromise exists. It does not remediate one. If we find an active attacker in your tenant, containment and remediation are separate work, and we will tell you plainly what that involves and what it would cost. We are not going to sell you a fix inside a detection engagement.

We are also not assessing your overall Microsoft 365 security posture, your compliance position, or your configuration generally. This is scoped to one question, deliberately, so that the answer arrives quickly and the price stays accessible.

And a finding of nothing is not a certificate of health. No detection capability catches everything. A clean report means we found no indicators of compromise, which is meaningful, but it is not a guarantee that your environment is secure.

From the first conversation to the findings review is about two weeks. Here is exactly what happens, and when.

Detection technology produces signals. Interpreting them accurately, and telling you honestly when something is nothing, takes experience. Exceed Cybersecurity is led by Brian Guenther, CISSP, CCA, CCNA, MCSE, with over 25 years in network security and infrastructure, alongside partner Timothy Marley, CISSP, CISA, CISM, CPA, CFE, with 30 years across cybersecurity, compliance, and audit. More about the team.

You are paying for the setup, the analysis, and a direct conversation with someone qualified to explain what your environment is actually telling us.

This engagement begins with a short conversation rather than a checkout page. There are two reasons for that, and neither is a sales tactic.

Not every environment qualifies. We need to confirm you are on Microsoft 365, that you can authorize an application in your tenant, and that your environment does not contain data that would require a different arrangement. Fifteen minutes answers all of that. A checkout page does not.

Scope affects price. The fee is based on the size of your Microsoft 365 tenant, and we would rather quote you accurately than post a number that turns out to be wrong for your organization.

Both of these are hard requirements. We would rather you hear them here than discover them in an order document.

• Your organization uses Microsoft 365. This engagement does not support Google Workspace or POP/IMAP email environments.
• You have Global Administrator access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, or direct access to someone who does, and you are able to authorize an application in that tenant.
• If a third party manages your Microsoft 365 tenant, you are able to obtain their cooperation.
• Your risk owner, meaning an owner, principal, or executive who can accept or act on security risk, is available to attend the findings review.
• You understand this engagement provides detection and reporting only, and does not include remediation.
• If your Microsoft 365 environment contains protected health information subject to HIPAA, or Controlled Unclassified Information, contact us before purchasing.

Not sure whether your environment qualifies? Call 240-377-0504 before purchasing and we will confirm.