Accounting & tax-advisory firms
One spoofed email is all it takes
to redirect your client's next wire.
Accounting firms hold the financial crown jewels of every client on the books - bank details, tax IDs, signed declarations, ERP access. One compromised inbox, one exposed file share, one leaked ERP credential, and the breach doesn't belong to one company. It belongs to dozens. We find those gaps before attackers do.
Get my free pre-scanThe honest version
Why accounting firms are the highest-ROI target on the internet
Not our opinion - this is what the FBI IC3 annual report5 and the Verizon DBIR4 consistently show: small professional-services firms handling money and client data are the highest-margin targets for both BEC and ransomware operators.
You hold dozens of wire transfers in-flight on any given week.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is the most profitable attack on small professional-services firms worldwide - the FBI's IC3 tracks billions in annual losses, most from wire redirects. Your inbox is the ATM: one spoofed thread mid-transfer and a client's payment goes to an attacker's account.
Your credentials unlock your clients’ financial systems.
You have delegated access to banking portals, ERP systems (Comarch, Symfonia, Optima, SAP), and tax-authority filing portals for every client on your books. One phished login doesn't breach one company - it breaches every company you serve.
Tax season is a fixed deadline attackers exploit.
Ransomware hitting a firm in March or October - the weeks when every client has statutory filing deadlines - is a crisis without slack. Attackers know this, time their demands accordingly, and price the ransom against the cost of your clients’ missed deadlines.
You look like a soft target from the outside.
Most small and mid-sized accounting firms run a file server or NAS with years of client data, a remote-access solution for partners, and ERP web portals - all with minimal perimeter hardening. To an attacker scanning the public internet, the delta between what you are and what a fintech is, is enormous.
The assessment
What we check at your firm
SMB / NAS exposure (port 445)
File shares or NAS devices with client tax files and historical records reachable from the internet. A single exposed share is a catastrophic risk for a firm, and it’s a scan away from being found.
ERP & banking-portal credential exposure
Staff credentials for Comarch, Symfonia, Optima, SAP, or online banking portals that have appeared in dark-web breach dumps. Direct path to financial system takeover - typically from a password reused on an unrelated site.
BEC / email-fraud configuration
We audit SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain. Missing or permissive records let attackers send mail that passes authentication checks and lands in your clients’ inboxes with your firm’s name on it - the opening move in almost every wire-redirect fraud.
VPN & remote-access security
Remote-desktop gateways, VPN concentrators, Citrix portals. We check for known CVEs, default or weak credentials, and brute-force exposure - the three paths used in the majority of SMB ransomware entries.
Cloud storage exposure
Misconfigured OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive or Dropbox folders sharing client declarations, contracts, or tax returns with anyone-with-the-link. We find what’s indexable and flag it before a client’s name ends up in a breach database.
Lookalike domain & spoofing exposure
We search for recently-registered lookalike domains of your firm (twoja-firma-pl.com, twojafirma.co, etc.) - the standard first-step infrastructure for a targeted BEC campaign against your client list.
The real cost
What a breach actually costs a firm
Regulatory & professional sanctions
A breach of client financial data triggers GDPR / UODO enforcement - and for accounting firms, a parallel risk of sanctions from professional bodies (SKwP, KRBR). Licence and PIB certification are on the line. The fine ceiling is €20M or 4% of turnover (GDPR Art. 83). Plus licence review.
Client civil liability
Clients whose financial data, tax IDs, and bank details leak can pursue civil damages. Because a firm breach exposes every client simultaneously, aggregated liability can exceed the firm’s insurance by orders of magnitude. You become the breach vendor in their incident report.
Incident cost
IBM’s 2024 figure for breaches at organisations under 500 employees. For an accounting firm hit in filing season, the practical cost is typically lower on paper but higher in churn - missed deadlines, penalty interest passed to clients, and retainers quietly moved elsewhere the following quarter.
See what a real report looks like
Here's what a pre-scan report for an accounting firm actually contains
We've redacted the firm name and domain. Everything else is the real output - the findings, the BEC / email-security verdict, the credential-exposure list, and the prioritised action plan your managing partner can hand to your IT provider the same day.
Deliverables
What you receive
Every firm that orders the full assessment gets the same package - no tiers, no upsells, no "enterprise only" features held back.
- Executive PDF report in plain English (Polish version on request) - board-ready, no jargon
- Full vulnerability list with CVSS severity scoring and exploit likelihood per finding
- BEC / email-fraud configuration audit: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and domain-spoofing risk assessment
- Credential-exposure report cross-referenced against dark-web breach databases
- SMB, NAS and cloud-storage exposure map - every shared folder the internet can see
- Prioritised remediation plan your IT provider or managed-services firm can action directly
- 30-minute debrief call to walk through findings and answer questions from partners or IT
Questions managing partners ask us
Accounting-firm objections, answered
- “Our IT provider says we’re fine - why do we need a second opinion?”
- The same reason a company uses one firm to keep the books and a different one to audit them. Your IT provider is configuring and maintaining the systems; they are not an independent assessor of their own work. The pre-scan is an outside view of what an attacker sees, which is a different and more relevant question than “is my IT setup tidy.”
- “We handle client data - can you do this without seeing any of it?”
- Yes. The pre-scan is external only: we work from public information and your domain. We do not log into your systems, we do not touch client files, and we do not need an NDA to start (though we’ll sign one happily if you prefer). If the engagement expands, we sign full client-confidentiality paperwork before any internal access.
- “When is the right time to do this - before or during tax season?”
- Well before. The worst moment to discover a critical exposure is in the second week of March. A pre-scan in the quiet months (May-September, November-February) gives your IT provider time to remediate without missing any client’s filing deadline.
Get a free pre-scan for your firm
You send us your domain. We tell you in 24 hours what an attacker sees from the outside. If it's nothing serious, you keep the report and we disappear. If it's serious, you get a fixed-price proposal - no pressure, no subscription.
Get my free pre-scanNDA available before any engagement. No access to your systems at any stage.
Sources
- 1GDPR Art. 83 - administrative fines (eur-lex.europa.eu)
- 2IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 (ibm.com/reports/data-breach)
- 3GDPR Art. 33 - 72-hour breach notification (eur-lex.europa.eu)
- 4Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2024 (verizon.com/dbir)
- 5FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Annual Report (ic3.gov)