Why Tool Sprawl Is Now a Live Security Risk

Tool sprawl is no longer just a margin and integration problem for MSPs. New 2026 threat data shows attackers are actively hijacking the same RMM tools MSPs run every day, and every redundant agent sitting on a client endpoint is one more login and one more piece of trusted software an attacker can turn against you.

The threat data changed the conversation

Huntress's 2026 Cyber Threat Report found that RMM abuse jumped 277% year over year and showed up in nearly a quarter of all the incidents Huntress investigated. The company's own announcement puts a number on that share, saying that the abuse of RMM tools surged 277% year-over-year, accounting for 24% of all observed incidents. The report is not a survey. It comes from telemetry across more than four million endpoints and nine million identities, spanning over 230,000 organizations Huntress protects worldwide, which makes the finding directly relevant to anyone running client infrastructure at scale rather than a general statistic that happens to mention MSPs in passing.

The tools involved are not obscure or unpatched software. They are the remote access and monitoring platforms most MSPs already run as core infrastructure. Huntress reports that over 50% of cases following suspicious Atera RMM activity are directly linked to ransomware attacks. That is a big part of why signature-based detection struggles here. An attacker using a legitimate, digitally signed RMM agent looks identical at the security tool level to a technician doing routine maintenance, and only behavioral monitoring, watching what an agent does rather than what it is, catches the difference.

Why is a trusted tool the attacker's best option?

Because it already has the access a criminal would otherwise need to build from scratch. An RMM agent typically runs with elevated privileges, has an approved path through the firewall, and is explicitly allowlisted by whatever endpoint protection the client has in place. Once an attacker gets control of that agent, or simply installs a copy of it that looks the same as your legitimate deployment, they inherit all of that trust without tripping the alerts a genuinely foreign piece of malware would set off.

Huntress makes the same point about why this works: security products are tuned to spot known bad signatures, but a valid RMM binary isn't a red flag, so it often slips past security.

This is also why the federal government has been sounding this alarm for years, not months. CISA, the NSA, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory to warn network defenders about malicious use of legitimate remote monitoring and management software. Its recommended mitigations are concrete. The advisory tells defenders to audit remote access tools on your network to identify currently used and authorized RMM software. It also says to require authorized RMM solutions only be used from within your network over approved remote access solutions, such as virtual private networks or virtual desktop interfaces. Finally, it says to block both inbound and outbound connections on common RMM ports and protocols at the network perimeter.

What does this have to do with tool consolidation?

Every one of those federal mitigations gets harder to execute the more tools you have running across your client base, and easier the fewer you have. An approved software inventory is a short, manageable list when you standardize on one RMM platform across your book of clients. It becomes a much longer, harder to audit list when different technicians, different acquired books of business, or different one off client requests have left you running several overlapping remote access tools that nobody has fully reconciled.

This reframes consolidation as a security control, not just a cost and efficiency initiative. A stack audit that used to be framed purely around license spend or technician screen fatigue now has a second, arguably more urgent justification: fewer distinct remote access tools means a shorter list to monitor, a smaller set of vendors whose patch cadence you have to track, and fewer places an attacker can hide inside something that looks like normal maintenance traffic.

How should you actually run this as an operational project?

Start with an inventory of every remote access and monitoring agent currently deployed across your client base, not just the ones your primary RMM platform manages. Legacy tools left behind after a client migration, a technician's personal favorite utility installed on a handful of endpoints, or a leftover agent from an acquired book of business are exactly the kind of unmanaged installs that show up as blind spots in an incident response after the fact.

Once you have that list, apply the same standard CISA recommends: anything not on your approved list gets removed, not flagged for later review. A remote access tool with no documented business justification and no owner accountable for its patching is a liability whether or not it has ever been abused yet. This is also the moment to formalize who has authority to install a new remote access tool going forward, since the sprawl you are cleaning up today mostly got there one reasonable seeming exception at a time.

Set a deadline for the removal work, not just the inventory. An audit that identifies unapproved agents but leaves them running while the team gets to it eventually is functionally the same as not auditing at all, since the exposure the report just documented stays live the entire time. Treat every unapproved agent found as an open ticket with an owner and a close date, the same way you would treat an unpatched critical vulnerability, because at the endpoint level that is essentially what it is.

Layer behavioral monitoring on top of whatever tools survive that audit, since an attacker using your own approved software correctly will not trip signature-based detection. That is a technician training and process question as much as a purchasing decision, and it needs to sit with whoever owns security operations, not get treated as a line item a procurement team quietly manages in isolation.

What changes if you treat this as a security issue instead of a cost issue?

The audit gets prioritized differently. A consolidation project framed around license savings competes for budget against every other cost cutting initiative and often loses. The same project framed around a documented jump in real world RMM abuse incidents, tied to a federal advisory your cyber insurance carrier may already be asking about, tends to move to the top of the list a lot faster, because the downside of waiting is now a breach story, not a slightly bloated software budget.

It also changes who needs to be in the room. A purely operational consolidation decision can live entirely with whoever manages vendor relationships. A consolidation decision framed around reducing attack surface belongs with whoever owns your security posture and your cyber insurance renewal conversation, since both of those groups now have a direct, current stake in how many remote access tools are running across your client base and whether every one of them is accounted for.

Getting the operational side of this right, cleanly onboarding clients onto a single standardized stack instead of leaving legacy tools running in parallel during a migration, is exactly the kind of provisioning work Catalyst is built to handle, so consolidation actually finishes instead of leaving a trail of half migrated endpoints behind. Before you commit to a consolidation roadmap, Actiforge's stack builder is a fast way to see which of your current tools overlap and which ones nobody can actually justify keeping.

The tools that made your service desk faster years ago are the same tools an attacker is now more likely to target, precisely because you trust them enough to leave the door open. Review the rest of Actiforge's product catalog for the tools built to help you close that gap without slowing your team down.

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