Blue Paladin

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Right before a holiday, when everyone’s already halfway out the door, a client’s firewall got nailed with a zero day. An attacker slipped inside and started moving laterally. The kind of situation that doesn’t just ruin your day. It hijacks your weekend and keeps going.

But Blue Paladin did what they’ve done for more than 23 years: take control, steady the client, and move fast.

This time, they didn’t have to do it alone.

As a leading managed service provider (MSP), Blue Paladin relies on the Huntress Security Platform as the foundation for their services—and their standards are blunt. As CTO Cameron Call puts it, “Huntress is the core. It’s everything to us. It’s not negotiable.”

Challenge | Managing endless alerts with seemingly endless tools 

Before Huntress, Blue Paladin was juggling a mix of security vendors: a security operations center (SOC) provider with their own endpoint detection and response (EDR), a separate antivirus product, plus other tools that didn’t play nicely together.

The cost was far more than money. It cost focus and energy. And it cost time Blue Paladin could never get back.

Call describes the grind plainly: “I probably spent 10 hours a week just managing alerts.”

It became clear they needed a new setup that:

• Reduced tool sprawl (without reducing protection)

• Cut noise and false positives

• Helped them respond faster, especially when something critical happened

• Didn’t require hiring a dedicated 24/7 SOC just to run the tools

Solution | Straightforward tools backed by real people

Call says it wasn’t only the Huntress products that pulled him in. It was the transparency, specifically Huntress showing up in the community (including on Reddit) and talking like humans, not like vendors who make you “jump through hoops.”

Then came the difference-maker: straightforward, purpose-built tooling backed by a 24/7 SOC, an elite team of human threat analysts augmented by AI and automation. 

For Blue Paladin, that changed the day-to-day. Instead of burning hours on noise, Huntress handled the heavy lifting. “The SOC is always looking, triaging, and getting rid of the false alerts,” explains Call. “And Huntress only sends us the actionable stuff.”

The turning point | A holiday incident that could’ve been brutal

That pre-holiday zero day became the proof point.

An attacker exploited the firewall and started spreading across the environment. Call remembers it clearly: “Huntress shut it down fast.” And with a client of roughly 100 staff members, he adds that if the threat had “latched on to anything, it would’ve ruined Christmas, quite literally for many people.”

Blue Paladin led the response. Huntress helped them move with clarity. The SOC alerted them immediately, helped isolate the threat, and worked alongside Call’s team to remediate and understand what happened.

And when things got messy, Huntress stayed in it. Call explains that after the initial compromise, the attacker tried “throwing credentials out there” and succeeded in accessing other accounts that had “slipped our notice.” He says the SOC helped him step by step by “leading investigations, reverse engineering everything, and cleaning up some loose ends that weren’t immediately obvious.”

In the middle of all that stress, Blue Paladin got a rare holiday gift: room to breathe. “It’s just a sense of relief knowing Huntress has our back,” says Call.

Results | More confidence and more time for the holidays

With Huntress behind them, Blue Paladin saw clear wins:

• Time returned: The 10 hours a week Call spent reviewing alerts were “freed up when we partnered with Huntress.”

• More confidence in what matters: Call proudly says, “We know if Huntress is calling, something’s going down.”

• Less tuning pain: Prior tools required constant tuning and still produced false positives. With Huntress, Blue Paladin notes they’ve had no issues.

• Stopping real threats earlier: The Huntress Security Platform catches business email compromise (BEC) patterns and risky mailbox behavior (like forwarding rules and rogue apps) that Blue Paladin didn’t have visibility into before.

• No forced headcount: While traditional security information and event management (SIEM) tools typically require a dedicated team of analysts to manage, the Huntress Security Platform offers a "white-gloved" Managed SIEM that removes that operational burden. Call adds they would’ve needed more staff to get the same value elsewhere.

When asked about the biggest benefit, Call doesn’t dress it up: “My biggest one is just peace of mind.”

Today, Blue Paladin’s value is leadership under pressure. They’re the calm voice, the fast response, and the follow-through. And Huntress amplifies their capabilities by reducing noise, providing round-the-clock SOC coverage and helping uncover what isn’t obvious.

Or, as Call put it: “Huntress is the core."