AV | Independent Title Insurance Agents / Real Estate & Escrow Transactions Cyber Brief

2026 Week 5

Real Estate & Escrow Transactions Secured

Independent Title Insurance Agents remain highly exposed to identity compromise (vishing against SSO/admins) and platform-trust abuse that bypasses traditional email filtering (Zendesk spam relay; brand impersonation calls). This is because many agents rely on MSPs/SaaS for production systems and document workflows, a single SSO takeover or third-party breach can cascade into escrow communications, wire instructions, and client PII exposure. The best near-term risk reduction comes from phishing-resistant MFA, strict conditional access, and hardened call-back verification processes for “urgent” requests. Also, all Third-Party technology providers with access to the Agents environment must be required to use (1) phish proof MFA + (2) privileged access management (PAM) with check out, check in, and logging controls + (3) strong security programs certified by a security professional.

Key Signals

• Vishing kits can defeat non-phishing-resistant MFA (↑)

• FortiGate patch bypass reports persist (↑)

• Third-party MSP vendor continuous breaches in news (↑)

  
  

Threat Highlights

• Browser session state takeover → access to title production systems and other title technology (↑)

• SSO takeover → mailbox/document access → transaction manipulation risk (↑)

• Edge device compromise enabling persistent access (↑)

Critical Vulnerabilities

• FortiGate CVE-2025-59718 patch-bypass activity

  
  

Recommended Actions for your IT and MSP Teams

• Enforce passkeys/FIDO2 for owners/admins; restrict logins by geography/network zones (↓)

• Research bowser session state protection controls (↓)

• Add “call-back to known number” for any payment/wire change request (↓)

• Validate perimeter devices; monitor for rogue accounts/config exports (↓)

  
  

FAIR QuickQuant (12-month)

Scenario: Browser session state takeover → access title production applications + other title technology solutions → access to escrow workflows (↑)

• Loss Event Frequency (LEF): 0.5–1.5 / year

• Loss Magnitude (LM): $250k–$2.5M

• Annualized Loss Exposure: $125k–$3.75M / year

FAIR-CAM Cyber Control Category Focus

• Avoidance (↓): remove legacy auth, reduce exposed admin paths, protect web browser session states

• Resistance (↓): phishing-resistant MFA, conditional access

• Responsive (↓): rapid tenant lockdown + client notification run books

Metrics to Track Starting Today

• % of escrow and admin accounts on passkeys

• % of MSP and other third-party provdiers using phishing proof MFA + privilved access management (PAM) for all accounts that can acccess a title agents assets and infrastructure

• Maturity of identity investment (1 - 5 scale)