The MSP Minute ⏱ Wednesday 29 April 2026
For Managed Service Providers worldwide. Today... huge attack on security giant... Microsoft's biggest AI launch in years goes live tomorrow... and $250 billion bet on the channel
🔴 A home security giant just got broken into. 5.5 million customers' data is already on the dark web
This is about a consumer-facing organisation that’s been breached, but it’s worth us talking about because of how they got in.
ADT secures more than 6 million homes and small businesses across the US and Canada. Last week, extortion group ShinyHunters gained access to ADT’s systems by voice phishing an employee and hijacking their Okta single sign-on account.
From there, they walked straight into ADT’s Salesforce instance and helped themselves. The group listed ADT on their leak site on April 23 with a “pay or leak” ultimatum. ADT didn’t pay. And ShinyHunters leaked 11GB of stolen data. BleepingComputer
Have I Been Pwned confirmed 5.5 million unique email addresses exposed, along with names, phone numbers, physical addresses, and in some cases partial Social Security numbers. ADT filed with the SEC four days after detecting the breach… a window that security experts noted was not exactly swift.
The attack method is the one worth flagging to your clients: no sophisticated hacking or zero-day exploit. Instead, just one phone call to one employee. What processes do your clients have in place to verify who’s on the phone?
🟡 Microsoft's biggest AI launch in years goes live on Friday. Here's what MSPs need to know
Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 go generally available on Friday. If you haven’t had this conversation with clients yet, here’s what you need to know.
E7 is Microsoft’s new premium licence tier at $99 per user per month, bundling together E5, Copilot, the Entra identity suite and Agent 365. This is a single dashboard for managing, governing, and securing AI agents across a client’s entire environment, whether built by Microsoft, a third party, or the client themselves. Channel Dive
Microsoft also updated its partner programme yesterday to introduce new Frontier Badge specialisations. These are essentially a way for MSPs to signal to clients that they have verified capability to design and deliver AI agent solutions. If you’re planning to position yourself in this space, it’s worth understanding what that badge requires.
The pricing case is worth knowing: buying E5, Copilot, and Agent 365 separately under July 2026 pricing totals $105 per user per month. E7 brings that to $99. Simple story to tell a client already on E5 who’s been trialling Copilot. Microsoft
🟢 AT&T just committed $250 billion to network investment… and wants 65% of it to flow through channel partners
File this one under: enormous numbers that are great for MSPs!
At last week’s Channel Partners Conference in Las Vegas, AT&T shared a target that got relatively little attention given everything else going on at the event: 65% of all AT&T company activity to flow through designated channel partners, backed by $250 billion in network investment over the next decade. Yahoo!
That’s not a vague commitment. That’s a structural shift by one of the world’s largest telecoms companies toward doing the majority of its business through partners like you (rather than direct sales teams).
It sits alongside the broader theme from the conference: the big players are increasingly deciding that the channel is where their customers live, and they’d rather fund the channel than compete with it.
OK, that’s Wednesday. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow morning. Have a cracking day.