Marketing and advertising agencies
You run paid media in accounts that belong to your clients, and access was granted informally.
Marketing, advertising & creative agencies
Your agency holds the keys to accounts you do not own
Client ad accounts, client inboxes, client social profiles, handed over on trust and kept in a spreadsheet. PikeShield secures the part of an agency that nobody put in the scope of work: the credentials, the contractors, and the first hour after something goes wrong on a client's account.
We never hold your client credentials
Read-only assessment under NDA
No client data in reports
Fit
Built for agencies that log into accounts belonging to somebody else
Creative and production studios
Freelancers and contractors rotate per project, each one needing access to something.
Social and content agencies
You post as the brand, so a compromise of your access becomes their public problem.
Agencies being asked security questions
A larger client sent a vendor questionnaire and nobody on the team knows how to answer it honestly.
01Client grants access
02Credentials spread
03Contractors join
04Project ends
05Access remains
06Incident
07Client conversation
Diagnosis
Five failures specific to agencies
Not the generic small business list. These come from how agency work is actually structured.
LEAK 01
Client credentials live in a spreadsheet
Passwords for client platforms get shared over email, chat or a master list that somebody started years ago and everyone still uses. Documented as a standing pattern in agency operations: shared credentials in unencrypted channels and a single list covering every client the agency serves.
LEAK 02
The freelancer never had a last day
A contractor has no offboarding ticket, no HR exit, and often no company account, just an invitation sent to their personal profile. When the project ends, nothing revokes anything. In one documented case, attackers reached five client ad accounts through the compromised personal account of a single contractor (Cerby, vendor case study, illustrative).
LEAK 03
The ad accounts are the actual target
Attackers are not after your files, they are after billing-enabled advertising accounts. Mimecast recorded 6.4 million Meta Business Manager and Google Ads account takeover detections over four years, 1.86 million of them in the second half of 2025 alone, the highest in the series (Mimecast via Help Net Security, 29 July 2026). An account with a 5,000 dollar monthly budget can be drained in hours, while recovery takes months (same source).
LEAK 04
You are the third party in your client's risk register
Third party involvement in breaches climbed from 15 percent to 30 percent in a single year, and reached 48 percent of all breaches in the following edition, with missing or misconfigured MFA and excessive permissions named as root causes (Verizon DBIR 2025, April 2025, and DBIR 2026, May 2026). To your client's security team, you are the third party.
LEAK 05
The incident happens on their account, the conversation is yours
When unauthorized content posts from a client's profile or their ad budget disappears, the damage is not only technical. The agency owns that phone call, and there is usually no written plan for who says what, in what order, to whom.
The system
Organized around outcomes. Not a menu of tactics.
Each capability answers one failure above, in the same order.
FIX 01
Get client credentials out of spreadsheets
Password vault rollout with per-client separation, sharing rules that survive staff turnover, and a recovery process that does not depend on one person's memory.
FIX 02
Offboarding that works for people who never onboarded
An access inventory that includes contractor and freelance access, plus a revocation runbook you can actually run on a Friday afternoon, tested rather than assumed.
FIX 03
Lock the advertising platforms specifically
MFA enforced on every account with billing attached, business manager roles reviewed and reduced, admin separated from day to day operator access, and legacy authentication paths closed.
FIX 04
Be able to answer the questionnaire
Your controls documented in the language client security teams use, so a vendor review becomes a form you fill in rather than a deal that stalls.
FIX 05
Rehearse the client-facing hour
An incident response plan written for the agency case: containment steps for a client account, an escalation path with names, and an agreed sequence for telling the client before they find out themselves.
Reframe
Winning the account is not the same as keeping it
Agencies invest heavily in new business and almost nothing in the thing that ends a client relationship overnight.
A compromised client account does not just cost the recovery work. It puts the agency in the position of explaining, to the person who hired them, how access they were trusted with was used against their company. Retention is the part of the business that a security incident attacks first, and it is the part nobody budgets to defend.
How we work
No client logos here, on purpose
Security work is confidential by nature, and an agency of all businesses knows what a borrowed logo is worth. Here is how the engagement behaves instead.
We never hold your client credentials
The work is designing where credentials live and who can reach them. They stay in your vault, under your control, not in our hands.
Read-only first, always under NDA
The assessment changes nothing. Scope is agreed in writing before any access is granted.
Plain language, ranked by business risk
A finding that puts a client account at risk outranks a high severity score on something nobody uses. Account managers and technical staff each get a version they can act on.
The runbook is yours to keep
Documentation is written so your own team or your next IT provider can run it. Security that depends on us being reachable is weak security.
01Assessment requested
02Access inventory complete
03Credentials migrated
04MFA enforced on billing accounts
05Verified re-check
A finding is an event. A verified re-check is a result. What the exact model looks like depends on which platforms you hold, how your contractors are engaged, and what your client agreements allow, so it is agreed during scoping rather than assumed.
Guardrails
How your work and your clients' data are handled
Client data stays out of our reports
Findings describe systems, accounts and access. We do not copy client data, creative assets or campaign data into deliverables.
We do not touch client ad spend
Nothing in this work involves managing, pausing or modifying live campaigns. That stays with your media team.
Scoped in writing before access
The systems in scope are named in advance, and the assessment phase is read-only under NDA.
Your client contracts come first
Where your agreements with clients restrict who can access their platforms, the scope is built to respect them. If a client needs to approve, we say so rather than working around it.
FAQ
The questions agencies actually ask
Someone took over our client's ad account. Can you help right now?
Incident response starts with containment: cutting the attacker's access, identifying what was changed, and preserving evidence before anything is reset. Contact PikeShield at daniel@pikeshield.com or +1 (768) 300-2261. Recovering a compromised advertising account with the platform can take considerably longer than containing the breach itself.
Do you need access to our clients' accounts?
No. The assessment looks at your agency's own systems, accounts and access patterns. Where a finding concerns a client platform, it is described so your team can act on it with the access they already hold.
We are eleven people. Is this overkill for us?
Size is not what makes an agency a target. Holding billing-enabled accounts that belong to other companies is what makes it a target, and an eleven person agency can hold dozens of them.
Our clients are starting to send security questionnaires. Does this help with that?
Yes, in the sense that it documents the controls you actually have in the language those questionnaires use. It is not a certification and it is not a substitute for one, it is being able to answer honestly and quickly.
How much does it cost?
PikeShield scopes each engagement to your environment, team size, and risk profile, so pricing is tailored rather than one-size-fits-all. The first step is a free security assessment, after which PikeShield outlines priorities and recommended next steps.
What happens in the first call?
A 30 minute working conversation about how access is granted in your agency today, which client platforms you hold, and what already worries you. It ends with a scoped next step or an honest answer that we are not the right fit.
Get started
A 30 minute working conversation
What it is: a scoped look at how access is granted in your agency and where the exposure sits. What it is not: a generic sales deck. What you leave with: a clear next step, or an honest answer that we are not the right fit.