The Buzz: TD SYNNEX names Chris Fabes in Canada, Huntress flags Azure CLI password spray attacks, and MSSP retention moves beyond salary

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, July 21, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

TD SYNNEX has appointed Chris Fabes as President of Canada, filling the role left by Mitchell Martin who retired earlier this year after more than thirty-six years with the company. In a statement, TD SYNNEX said Fabes brings more than two decades of IT channel leadership across vendor, distributor, and customer perspectives. He most recently led a multi-year strategic growth initiative at SHI across Canada, and before that served as Canadian channel chief at Lenovo, where he helped triple channel revenue to more than one point two billion dollars in three years. TD SYNNEX North America president Reyna Thompson said Fabes’ end-to-end understanding of the Canadian technology market makes him well positioned to lead the Canada business into its next chapter. The appointment comes at a time when TD SYNNEX has been expanding its vendor relationships in Canada, including recent global distribution deals with Fortinet and HPE. Canadian partners will be watching how Fabes shapes the distributor’s local strategy, particularly around AI, cybersecurity, and cloud marketplace growth.

A new Huntress report published Monday warns that threat actors have been running massive password spray attacks against Microsoft Azure Command Line Interface accounts, making more than eighty-one million attempts between June 12 and June 26, 2026. According to Huntress, attackers are exploiting a loophole in Azure CLI that does not support multifactor authentication, allowing them to target service accounts and non-human identities that are often poorly monitored. The company said most affected accounts were from large enterprises with complex cloud footprints, and that MSPs managing customer Azure environments are particularly exposed because these CLI accounts often fall outside normal identity monitoring workflows. Huntress has reported the issue to Microsoft. The research underscores a growing tension in identity security: as organizations lock down human-facing accounts with MFA, attackers are shifting to non-human identities and service accounts that lack the same protections. Canadian MSPs with hybrid Azure and Microsoft 365 clients should be reviewing whether their RMM and identity tools are catching CLI-level authentication anomalies.

MSSPs are facing a significant employee retention challenge, but salary is not the primary driver. According to a ChannelE2E feature published today, the main issue is what the report calls “invisible work” – security analysts spending hours on manual data correlation, reporting, and threat context that customers never see. Guardz, in announcing a new agentic reporting capability, said the problem is burning out analysts who feel their work lacks visible impact. The new tool uses an AI agent to automatically turn blocked threats, security activity, and client risk data into formatted reports that MSPs can present to SMB customers. Guardz is positioning the feature as a way to reduce the manual reporting burden while simultaneously demonstrating security value to clients. For Canadian MSPs, the issue is worth noting because talent retention in security operations is already tight, and any tool that reduces invisible overhead while improving client communication is likely to get attention from understaffed SOC teams.

In Brief – ManageEngine launches a developer marketplace for integrations, extensions, and AI agents. GAM Tech ranks number ninety-seven globally on the two thousand twenty-six MSP five hundred one and number one in Western Canada.

Later today on In The Channel, my conversation with Mark Sutor of Access Group and the Trust X Alliance on the Global Leadership Summit, the TXA AI agent, and the idea of distributor-as-platform is available now.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.