When Your Email Gets Hijacked, Who Do You Call?
Imagine showing up to work on Monday and discovering you can’t access your email. Not because you forgot your password. Because someone else changed it.
That’s exactly what happened to Richmond Valley Real Estate (not their real name). Hackers didn’t just break into their email. They locked the entire team out. Changed the credentials. Took control of everything.
For six weeks, they couldn’t access their email, client lists and documents. They ran their business from a single laptop with a Gmail address. Deals fell through. Clients went quiet. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission evaporated while they sat on hold with Microsoft support, getting absolutely nowhere.
Here’s the part that should make every agency owner uncomfortable: most small businesses have no escalation path with Microsoft. You’re just another ticket in a queue of millions. And attackers know this. They count on it.
Real estate agencies make perfect targets. You handle large transactions via email. You work under tight deadlines where stopping to verify a request feels like losing the deal. And when things go wrong, you probably don’t have a technical partner who can pick up the phone and actually fix it.
We got Richmond Valley back online.
· Rebuilt their access from scratch.
· Put emergency accounts in place so it could never happen again.
· Set up monitoring that catches threats before they escalate.
· Trained their team to spot the warning signs.
But here’s what we couldn’t give them back: six weeks of lost business, damaged client relationships, and the stress of watching their livelihood slip away while fighting to prove they owned their own email accounts.
The cost of prevention is a rounding error compared to the cost of recovery.
If you’re running an agency without emergency access accounts, without 24/7 monitoring, without a partner who can actually escalate with Microsoft when things go sideways, you’re betting your business on luck.
And attackers don’t believe in luck. They believe in easy targets.
Don’t wait until you’re the one sitting on hold. Get in touch for a free security assessment and find out where your gaps are before someone else does.
