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, built on telemetry from more than four million endpoints and nine million identities across over 230,000 organizations, found RMM abuse jumped 277 percent year over year and now accounts for roughly a quarter of all incidents the company investigated, up from just 7 percent in 2024. That dataset skews heavily toward SMB environments and the MSP channel, which makes the finding directly relevant to anyone running client infrastructure at scale rather than a general enterprise statistic that happens to mention MSPs in passing.

The tools named in that abuse are not obscure or unpatched software. ScreenConnect, Atera, MeshAgent, NinjaRMM, AnyDesk, and TeamViewer, the same remote access and monitoring platforms most MSPs already run as core infrastructure, show up repeatedly as the vehicles attackers use for persistent access and lateral movement. That is precisely 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.

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 issued a joint advisory on malicious RMM use in January 2023, and the pattern it warned about has only kept showing up in ransomware and persistent access cases since. The recommended mitigations have stayed consistent across both versions: restrict which RMM tools are authorized to run in an environment at all, require that any approved tool only connect through a managed VPN or centrally controlled access path, block RMM specific ports and protocols at the network perimeter by default, and actively monitor for any RMM client that was not part of the approved inventory.

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 three or four 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 the CISA advisory is explicit that signature based detection alone will not catch an attacker using your own approved software correctly. 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 277 percent 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 five 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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Sources: Huntress 2026 Cyber Threat Report | CISA, NSA, and MS-ISAC joint advisory on malicious use of RMM software.