Let’s talk about airport gift shops for a minute. You know the ones—tiny kiosks with $14 neck pillows, expired jerky, and three copies of Men’s Health no one’s ever going to read.

Now, tell me—how much sensitive data do you think one of those shops has lying around? Exactly. Not much. They outsource all their payments. No serious PCI data. No healthcare records. Nothing exotic.

So, low risk, right?

Wrong.

One of them is paying out $6.9 million after a breach. Not for credit card theft. Not for customer data. For employee data.

And not just any employees—former employees. Because guess what they never cleaned up? The skeletons in their HR closet.

What Went Wrong? Everything That Could.

Here’s how this played out:

In 2020, a ransomware group got in. No surprises there.

But then things got really messy.

  • They didn’t notify their employees for eight months.
  • They likely didn’t have a breach response plan worth using.
  • They had piles of old employee data they never deleted.

Result? A class action lawsuit—filed by their own employees—and a court-approved multi-million-dollar settlement. Go take a look. Here are the details:

The name of the case? Ramirez v. The Paradies Shops

The law firm? Morgan & Morgan.

The cost? Bankruptcy-level pain.

Now, Let’s Talk About You

You’ve got 25 paying clients? Maybe more? Congratulations—you’re carrying way more sensitive data than any airport kiosk ever dreamed of.

  • HR data
  • Medical records
  • Financial statements
  • Insurance information
  • Employee SSNs and PII from every client you’ve ever touched

Have lawyers? Even worse. Think about all the devastating information the have about people in their family dispute cases. And if you’re like most MSPs, you’ve still got data from clients you offboarded five years ago… just in case.

Which brings us to the real question:

What happens if you get breached?

No Response Plan = Total Panic

Here’s the brutal truth: If you don’t have a breach response plan, you don’t have a defense.

And when the clock starts ticking—when the ransomware drops or the email shows up saying “We have your data”—your ability to communicate quickly and correctly is the only thing that can save you. Paradies Shops delayed notification by eight months. That’s not negligence. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

So, What’s Sitting in Your Inbox Right Now?

Do your clients have a data destruction policy? Do you?  Because if your answer is, “Not really,” then you’ve already lost.

Every backup, every old payroll file, every signed PDF sitting in a forgotten SharePoint folder—it’s all ammo waiting to be fired at you.

Here’s How You Don’t End Up in Court

It’s not enough to lock things down.

You need to:

  • Build a defensible data security program
  • Document your policies
  • Track user training
  • Create a real, executable breach response plan
  • Know what you’re storing—and destroy what you don’t need

We’ve built a patent-pending process to help MSPs like yours figure out if a silent breach could already be happening—without your team even knowing it.

It’s fast. It’s sharp. And it could save your business.

Bottom Line: You’re Holding the Matchbox

You’ve got more data, more liability, and more exposure than an airport magazine rack. And if you don’t start collecting evidence, defining response plans, and purging old data?

The next $6.9 million settlement?

Could have your name on it.

[Schedule a Cyber Liability Assessment]

Let’s find out where you’re exposed—before someone else does.