In this edition of our "Employee Spotlight" series, I sat down with Andrew Schlemmer, a Channel Account Manager who came to Huntress with a personal score to settle with cybercriminals. For Andrew, this work hits close to home in the most literal sense.
Here's what he had to say.
What's your role here at Huntress?
Andrew: I'm a Channel Account Manager on our sales team. My job is connecting businesses to enterprise-grade security that doesn't require an enterprise-sized budget. A lot of the companies I talk to every day are exactly the kind of businesses that attackers love to target because they assume no one is watching out for them. That's exactly why I'm here.
Andrew Schlemmer enjoying a day in the "office"
Do you know anyone who's been hacked? Tell us about it.
Andrew: My own grandfather was the target. Back in 2020, an attacker called him and impersonated me. He had no reason not to believe it was really me on the other end of the line, and he ended up losing a significant amount of money because of it.
That one hit hard. It wasn't some faceless company that got breached. It was my family. And what made it worse was knowing there was nothing technically sophisticated about it. No malware, no complex intrusion. Just a convincing lie aimed at someone who trusted it.
After that, I threw myself into cybersecurity education. I ended up training over 500 adults on security practices, AI awareness, and tools like Google Workspaces. I wanted to give people something real and actionable, not just scare them with headlines. What happened to my grandfather happens to individuals and businesses every single day, and most of them had no idea it was coming.
How do you view that incident differently now that you're at Huntress?
Andrew: The scary part is realizing how much easier that attack would be to pull off today. What happened to my grandfather was straightforward social engineering, a phone call from someone pretending to be me. But now we're living in a world with AI voice cloning and deepfakes. An attacker can synthesize a family member's voice from a handful of audio clips. The emotional manipulation that worked on my grandfather in 2020 can now be made even more convincing, at scale, with almost no technical skill required.
That's the thing people don't always understand about threat actors: they're the fastest adopters of new technology. They don't wait to see how things shake out. They pick up whatever gives them an edge and run with it. Sitting at Huntress and seeing that reality up close every day makes the mission feel urgent in a way that's hard to put into words.
The Huntress takeaway
Andrew's story is a reminder that cyberattacks don't just happen to enterprises with sprawling IT departments. They happen to small businesses, families, and individuals who never saw themselves as a target. The tactics evolve, the technology gets sharper, and the emotional toll stays just as real.
That's the gap Huntress was built to close. By making enterprise-grade protection accessible to every business—not just the 1%—we're working to make sure what happened to Andrew's grandfather becomes a little harder to pull off.
Want to be part of the mission? Check out our open roles and join the hunt.
