Endpoint Protection Rollout for Brisbane SMBs: Catch the Credential Theft That Leads to a BEC Loss

Your office manager’s laptop has been running a little slow for a couple of weeks. Nobody thinks much of it. What is actually happening is that an info-stealer dropped two weeks ago is quietly harvesting saved browser passwords and session cookies, including the one for your Microsoft 365 tenant. A fortnight later, an attacker logs in from offshore, reads your inbox for a few days, learns your supplier rhythm, and sends an invoice-redirect email from inside your own domain. By the time you notice, you have wired six figures to the wrong account. Endpoint Protection Rollout from Cyber by Exegesis is the engagement that catches the laptop compromise before it becomes a Business Email Compromise loss.

The problem

Brisbane SMBs tend to think of BEC as an email problem. It is — but the email step is usually the last step. ACCC Scamwatch has BEC sitting among the highest-loss scam categories reported by Australian businesses, and the path in is overwhelmingly an endpoint that has no real detection running on it. Free antivirus, an old subscription nobody renewed, or “Defender is on, we are fine” — none of these catch a modern info-stealer that lives in memory, exfiltrates over HTTPS, and clears itself within hours.

The ACSC Small Business Cyber Security Guide is direct about this: practical endpoint controls — kept current, kept visible, kept under review — are foundational. Without an EDR tool tuned to your environment, the first time you find out a laptop was compromised is when the bank calls about a payment you did not authorise. By that point you are also working out whether the credential theft constitutes an eligible data breach under the OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.

What Endpoint Protection Rollout does

Cyber by Exegesis runs a fixed-scope engagement to put real endpoint detection in place across your business:

Cyber by Exegesis is the cyber consultancy line of Exegesis — the same company behind the DRMO live product. This engagement is preventive: we set the EDR baseline and tune it. We are not your MSP and we are not your 24/7 SOC.

How it works

  1. We confirm scope on a short call — endpoint count, operating systems, current AV, identity tenant (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), and who will own alerts after handover.
  2. We propose two or three EDR options with a one-page comparison and recommend one. You decide.
  3. We deploy in waves — pilot group first (typically owners and accounts), then the rest of the business over one to two weeks, with rollback ready at each step.
  4. We route alerts, document the runbook for the three or four alert types you are most likely to see, and sit with your nominated owner for a 45-minute walkthrough.
  5. We run the 30-day tuning window — checking in, suppressing noise, escalating real findings — then hand over with the written report.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane SMBs in construction, logistics, trades, and professional services are running on a mix of company laptops, personal devices, and field-deployed gear that rarely sees a head office. That distribution is exactly where endpoint visibility falls down — and exactly the path BEC attackers exploit to harvest a Microsoft 365 credential and pivot into the mailbox. A Brisbane SMB that rolls out a tuned EDR closes the credential-theft step that almost every BEC incident depends on, and gives you a defensible answer if you ever need to assess an incident against the OAIC NDB scheme.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when Cyber by Exegesis opens Endpoint Protection Rollout for Brisbane SMBs

We are sequencing engagements by endpoint count and identity tenant (Microsoft 365 first, Google Workspace second). Join the waitlist with your endpoint count and current AV — we will tell you when we are ready to take a brief from your business.