How Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation Stops Account Takeovers

The Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation (MLAC) supports a network of agencies delivering critical civil legal aid across housing, immigration, consumer matters, employment rights, veteran's benefits, family law, and more. Protecting sensitive client and financial data is essential — not only for compliance, but for maintaining the trust of the communities MLAC serves.

As MLAC expanded its centralized technology infrastructure, its three-person IT team faced growing complexity supporting more than 600 users across multiple agencies, needing to secure siloed environments and respond to evolving threats without adding operational overhead.

CHALLENGE

Securing a Complex, Distributed Environment

MLAC operates a shared infrastructure connecting multiple independent agencies, each functioning as its own silo. Ensuring users could only access the data they needed — while preventing lateral movement across environments — was critical. At the same time, the shift to cloud collaboration introduced uncontrolled sharing, stale links, and inconsistent permissions that created blind spots across SharePoint and OneDrive, making it difficult to maintain control at scale. Manual processes were no longer sustainable for a lean IT team supporting hundreds of users.

SOLUTION

Automating Data Security at Scale

With Varonis, MLAC automated the process of identifying and fixing risk across its environment. Automation Engine continuously analyzed permissions and removed excessive access, reducing the risk of lateral movement, while in the cloud, Varonis identified stale links and risky sharing to help restore control over sprawling collaboration. Work that would have taken hundreds or thousands of hours to address manually is now handled automatically, freeing the team to focus on higher-value initiatives — and over time, the environment became significantly cleaner, reducing alerts and improving overall efficiency.

The cloud just became the Wild West... people share links all the time. You need to know what's out there so you can control it as best as you can.

Stopping Threats Faster with Interceptor and MDDR

As email-based threats grew more sophisticated, MLAC evaluated new detection tools and selected Varonis Interceptor based on its ability to catch attacks other solutions missed during testing.

During the proof of concept, Interceptor identified attacks a competing solution missed, giving the team confidence it could uncover sophisticated threats before they reached users. Separately, when a compromised account at an affiliated organization raised concerns about potential data exposure, MLAC engaged Varonis MDDR to investigate. The team traced the attacker's activity and confirmed no sensitive data had been accessed, giving MLAC the evidence needed to quickly resolve stakeholder concerns.

They dug deep and were able to tell us exactly what happened. It's just phenomenal.

RESULTS

Reducing Risk Without Adding Overhead

With Varonis, MLAC achieved a stronger security posture without expanding its team — reducing the risk of lateral movement across agency environments, automating remediation of permissions and cloud data exposure, improving detection of advanced phishing and account takeover attempts, accelerating incident response and investigation, and lowering the operational burden on a lean IT team.

It's the stuff that keeps you up at night... and it takes that away.

Over time, automation transformed day-to-day operations at MLAC, turning what began as frequent alerts requiring manual review into a steady-state, low-noise security posture that lets the small IT team focus on strategic priorities instead of firefighting.

MLAC's partnership with Varonis has transformed how a lean IT team protects sensitive client data across a complex, distributed environment — letting the organization focus on its mission of delivering critical legal services with confidence that its data is secure.