I had an employee provide a resignation before I was on site. The employee then unplugged a desktop computer and left the premises with it. The computer contained pricing data, customer data, email communications, login credentials to several important websites, login info to vendor websites.
I filed a police report and the police were able to recover the computer, however the data on the machine was wiped or the drive was replaced.
What should I do?
Send the hard drive to a data recovery service, and then sue the former employee for the charges to recover the data – and probably loss of productivity and time as well.
Unless the drive was “secure-erased” - it’s probably recoverable.