MSP Remediates Critical Data Exposure Within Hours of Deployment

Overview

A managed service provider (MSP) onboarded a finance company to Cyflow to gain visibility into data exposure across the client's Microsoft 365 environment.

The Challenge

Before deploying Cyflow, the MSP had no visibility into the client's data sharing configuration. Microsoft 365's native admin tools don't surface oversharing risks at scale, and manual audits are time-consuming and incomplete.

The MSP needed a way to quickly assess the client's security posture and identify critical exposures — without spending days on manual investigation.

Deployment

The MSP connected the client's tenant and completed deployment in 30 seconds. Cyflow immediately began scanning the environment for overshared files and risky permissions.

Initial Scan Results

Within one hour of deployment, the initial scan completed. The results showed thousands of detected threats. Hundreds of them were flagged as critical or high priority, giving the MSP a clear picture of the client's risk exposure from day one.

Critical Finding

One of the first critical alerts the MSP analyzed was a document containing 18 credit card records. The file included full card numbers, CVV codes, expiration dates, and cardholder names. For a finance organization, this type of data exposure is a serious compliance and security risk.

The file was shared with "Anyone with the link" — meaning it was publicly accessible to anyone who had or could guess the URL.

Root Cause

Investigation revealed that an employee had shared their entire OneDrive desktop folder using the "Anyone with the link" permission. This single action exposed all files in that folder to:

• Other employees within the organization
• Third-party applications with access to the tenant
• Web search engines that index public links
• AI tools and services that scrape accessible data

Investigation

Using the Cyflow Inventory console, the MSP traced the exposure quickly. The full data visibility allowed them to see exactly which files were affected, who had access, and how the sharing was configured.

Remediation

The MSP contacted the client immediately after discovery. Together, they removed the public access permissions from all critical files. The exposure was eliminated the same day it was found.

"We had no idea this exposure existed. Cyflow found it in the first hour and we fixed it the same day. That's the kind of visibility we need for every client."

Conclusion

This case shows how a single misconfigured share can expose sensitive financial data to the open internet. The MSP had no way to know about this risk before deploying Cyflow — the client's existing tools didn't flag it.

From deployment to remediation, the entire process took less than a day. The MSP now runs Cyflow across all their managed tenants as part of their standard onboarding.