Busy Season Is Not The Time To Find Out

Most businesses spread their workload across twelve months, which gives an IT outage some slack to be absorbed — reschedule a meeting, push a deliverable a day. A tax or audit practice compresses most of its annual work into a few months, so an outage in the middle of filing season is not proportionally worse than one in July, it is categorically worse, because there is no slack anywhere in the calendar to absorb it. A server issue on March 14th does not feel like a server issue — it feels like a deadline the firm might actually miss, with a client who will remember exactly whose fault that felt like.

Firms that move client money are targeted for business email compromise specifically, and the attack is social engineering wearing a technical costume: a spoofed email thread, a revised wire instruction that looks routine, and money that does not come back once it clears. It rarely announces itself as an attack. It looks exactly like a client's normal request, which is precisely why it works, and why filtering alone is not the whole answer — the process around a wire change has to catch what the inbox does not, because by the time the email looks suspicious to a human reader the transfer is often already done.

The FTC Safeguards Rule obliges many tax preparers and financial services firms to maintain a written information security plan, and most firms discover that obligation from an insurer's questionnaire or a client's security review rather than in advance, at which point it is a scramble instead of routine paperwork. Facet MSP documents and implements that plan, deploys Proofpoint email filtering tuned for wire fraud patterns, and treats the weeks around filing deadlines as a change freeze — nothing gets touched that does not have to be, and the plan itself gets revisited annually rather than left to go stale the moment it is finished.