On Wednesday May 6th 2015, a few teachers informed me they couldn't locate some of the iPads assigned to
their classroom. We were missing 11 in total. We've had some go missing before, and it's usually because a student put them in the wrong place, etc. I didn't think much of it until Thursday when they still hadn't shown up anymore.
I got in touch with my Systems Engineer, Jeff Haydel, to see if I could find out when one of the iPads was last connected to our Wi-Fi network. He showed me how to run a report based on the MAC address (In HiveManager: Reports > Additional Reports > Clients), and I discovered that one of them went offline at 4:24 AM on 5/6.
We then went and pulled our access control logs and saw that a custodian came in at 3:50 AM (this is his normal arrival time). This meant that the alarm was off.
We started looking at our CCTV (closed-circuit television) logs and at 4:11 AM, we see two males attempting to open one of ours doors. All of our entrance doors are on access control, but we have some exit only doors that are not. We suspect that they found a way to open one of them and bypassed our internal CCTV cameras through either dumb luck or a careful strategy. In response, we are adding additional cameras and security measures.
Had it not been for the information from HiveManager, we would have had to waste time watching hours and hours of CCTV footage on multiple cameras.
The information that HiveManager gave us, we were able to narrow down _exactly_ when the iPads left our Wi-Fi network. The local news stations helped us broadcast the CCTV footage, and our parents helped us by sharing on social media.
On May 11th, the iPads were returned to the school by a lawyer. We suspect the parents saw their kids on the footage and acted to get them returned. We started with HiveManager and ended up the iPads being returned. When we installed Aerohive's controller-less Wi-Fi a few years ago, I never suspected it would aid us in recovering stolen items.
It was a wild few days, but we ended up exactly where we started, and I am okay with that.