STORY #1: ‘You’re Fired!’ (Oh, Can We Please Have Our Data Back?)

A nationwide medical appliances reseller had a large sales team dispersed across the United States, with many individual salespeople using company devices – such as phones, tablets and laptops – from their homes, airports or other remote locations. The business’s most important and guarded information was its client list; in fact, one time a former employee had managed to steal some client data from this list and use it to build a rival (and successful) company.

Salespeople working for this company were trusted with portions of the client list to perform their jobs. Unfortunately, sales can be a tough line of work, and sometimes the company let people go due to their performance. In one case, a salesperson received the call from the company telling her she was fired, and she snapped. They asked her to return the company’s property (that is,, its devices, which held part of its all-important client list). She said “No” and hung up.

The company called us immediately, and we launched our remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool to find out what was happening with the salesperson’s devices. Right away, we discovered that the woman had begun copying the client list to a USB drive. We responded with commands to cancel the file transfer and delete those files, but she then took the laptop offline. From there, it was up to the police.

We made it clear to the company how much better that scenario would have gone with better preparation. With a heads up of a few minutes, MSP-friendly tools would have deleted all sensitive data, revoked the salesperson’s credentials, and could have even timed a kill command to shut down her devices the moment her phone rang. What the company did was similar to delivering breaking – and devastating - news to someone who was holding a murder weapon. If the company had thought of what could happen, she could have been disarmed easily.