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On Day One With a New Client, We Found Intruders in Their Email. They Had Been There for Months...
In October 2019, a roughly 30-person company in Chicago's western suburbs, every employee on Office 365 email, became an Edward Technology client. On the first afternoon of onboarding, our monitoring lit up: sign-ins to multiple mailboxes from foreign countries, running quietly for months. The access was cut the same day. The discovery was recorded, and the video is below.
30
employees on
Office 365
Multiple
mailboxes
hacked
Day 1
discovery on install
Months
undetected email access
2
countries of origin
Same day
hacking stopped forever
The first afternoon
Onboarding a new client starts the same way every time: we install our security and alerting software into the Microsoft tenant and let it look around. Here, it did not need long. Within the first afternoon, alerts were firing, sign-ins to multiple mailboxes originating from Pakistan and India. A quick check confirmed the obvious: nobody at the company works outside the United States.
Stopped the same day
The access was cut that same day: credentials secured, sessions ended, intruders locked out, monitoring left running permanently. Months of silent access, ended in an afternoon, not because the fix was hard, but because someone was finally looking.
What this story is really about
Every business in this story's position believes its email is fine, because silence and safety feel identical from the inside. Real Microsoft 365 management means someone watches the sign-ins. A real security stack means alerts exist and a human reads them. And a risk assessment exists to answer, before day one of an incident, the question these logs answered after months: who has been in here?
Who is reading your email right now?
If the honest answer is "we would have no way of knowing," that is the same answer this company would have given the day before we arrived. Call 847.737.8111, or start with the complimentary onsite evaluation, the first afternoon is sometimes the most important one.
