Endpoint Protection Rollout for Perth SMBs: Catch the Business Email Compromise on the Laptop Before It Reaches the Mailbox
Your office manager clicks a link in what looks like a routine DocuSign email, signs in on a page that looks exactly like Microsoft, and gets a “session expired” error. Nothing else happens — visibly. Quietly, an attacker now has her session token, is reading her mailbox from a residential IP, has set up a hidden inbox rule, and is waiting for the next supplier invoice to redirect. The first signal that anything is wrong almost always shows up on the endpoint: an unusual sign-in tool, a script run, a browser extension installed, a token replayed from a new device. Endpoint Protection Rollout from Cyber by Exegesis is the engagement that puts an EDR tool across every Perth SMB device and tunes it to catch that signal.
The problem
ACCC Scamwatch consistently ranks business email compromise as one of the highest-loss scam categories reported by Australian businesses. Most Perth SMBs assume BEC is a “mailbox problem” — and so they invest in mail filtering and leave the endpoint as a stock Windows install with default Defender settings nobody has ever opened. That is a gap. By the time the attacker is acting inside the mailbox, the initial compromise — credential phishing, OAuth consent abuse, info-stealer malware, a rogue browser extension — has usually already happened on a laptop or a phone.
The ACSC Small Business Cyber Security Guide is direct on this point: hardened endpoints with active detection are part of the baseline SMB control set, not an enterprise-only luxury. Without an EDR tool that is actually deployed across all devices and actually tuned, an SMB has no telemetry to investigate when a payment goes wrong — and no early-warning signal before it does.
What Endpoint Protection Rollout does
Cyber by Exegesis runs a fixed-scope engagement that puts an EDR (endpoint detection and response) tool across your fleet and tunes it for your environment:
- Tool selection appropriate to your size, OS mix, and existing Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licensing — we are tool-agnostic and will not push a product we do not think fits.
- Deployment across all SMB endpoints in scope: laptops, desktops, mobiles, and servers. We do not leave the office manager’s personal-but-used-for-work laptop out of scope and pretend it is not there.
- Alert routing configured to a channel a human actually reads — not an inbox nobody monitors.
- A 30-day tuning window where we work through the noisy alerts, suppress the false positives, and lift the signal-to-noise ratio to something a non-specialist owner can act on.
- A short written report with the deployment state, the tuned alert set, and what to escalate when.
Cyber by Exegesis is the cyber consultancy line of Exegesis — the same company behind the DRMO live product. This engagement is preventive and detective in nature. We deploy and tune; we are not a 24/7 SOC and we will tell you honestly when an alert needs an incident responder rather than us.
How it works
- We confirm the engagement scope on a short call, count the endpoints in scope (including BYOD devices used for work email), and confirm your existing licensing position.
- We propose one or two EDR options with the trade-offs written down, and you choose.
- We deploy the agent across the fleet in waves over one to two weeks, starting with finance and admin staff — the people who handle invoices and are the BEC target set.
- We configure alert routing into a channel you read daily, and walk you through the first week of alerts together.
- We run the 30-day tuning window, then deliver the written report with the tuned baseline and a 90-day review window.
Why this matters in Perth
Perth SMBs in resources services, engineering consultancies, and professional services run lean IT and move significant supplier payments — exactly the operating profile BEC attackers target. The two-hour time-zone offset from the eastern states also means a Perth SMB owner is often the last person looking at email at the end of the Australian business day, and the first attacker activity frequently lands overnight on AWST while nobody is watching. An EDR tool that is actually deployed and actually tuned closes that overnight gap: the alert fires when the token is replayed from a residential IP at 2am Perth time, not when the redirected invoice clears a week later. If a BEC incident does result in an eligible data breach, the same endpoint telemetry is what your OAIC notification and your insurer will both ask for.
Sources
- ACSC Small Business Cyber Security Guide: https://www.cyber.gov.au/protect-yourself/resources-protect-yourself/personal-cyber-security-guides
- ACSC Essential Eight Maturity Model: https://www.cyber.gov.au/resources-business-and-government/essential-cyber-security/essential-eight/essential-eight-maturity-model
- ACCC Scamwatch (National Anti-Scam Centre): https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/
- OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches scheme: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/notifiable-data-breaches
- Cyber by Exegesis — Endpoint Protection Rollout (waitlist)
Join the waitlist
We are sequencing engagements by fleet size and OS mix (Windows-heavy first, mixed Windows/macOS second). Join the waitlist with your endpoint count and current email tenant — we will tell you when we are ready to take a brief from your business.