There's two things happening.
One thing is there's real things that happen, real tragic school shootings, and everybody is aware of when they happen, and so that's in the back of everyone's mind, from student all the way through everyone else in the district. But then there's these fake incidents that equally take a toll because we have to communicate them, we have to respond to them.
From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio, it's the big take, I'm West Kasova today, a new kind of intruder in America's schools. Drills to prepare for an active shooter are now sadly a routine part of life for students and teachers across the US, And if that weren't stressful enough, schools are now seeing a sharp increase in the number of false threat It's like bomb scares or reports of violence that are intended to create chaos. The police rush in, the school,
goes into lockdown, and kids and their parents are unnerved. Today, Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Jeff Stone tells us about the proliferation of these swatting events.
That's what they're called for less than one hundred dollars in some cases, these services will say that we will dial this school or this business and we will make X kind of threat.
And later in the show, you.
Know, there's the securing of the building itself, but then there's the where did this message come from part of it, and so that's something that we would do with the police.
That's Matt Landahl. He's a school superintendent in New York who's had to send his schools into lockdown twice in the last two months after swatters threatened violence. Jeff, let's just start with the BaseX. What is a swatting incident?
A swatting incident roughly is and there's a false report. Often it's a hoax of someone phoning in a emergency to a local police department. Often that police department will then respond in force, whether it be a swat team or officers with guns drawn to a school, to a home.
Residents or business People on the internet often are phoning in these fake events and reporting an active shooter situation that doesn't seem to exist, or a bomb threat or another emergency that would really induce the kind of panic that no one would want to experience in their life.
And they call this swatting because it's kind of calling in the SWAT team.
That's right.
So the result is that you might be a principal or a teacher or a student at a school. Everything's going completely normally, and then the trucks pull in. There are helicopters hovering overhead. There is a fleet of emergency vehicles, multiple fire departments responding to an emergency that doesn't exist.
Jeff, We're seeing this happening all over the country, and it's happening a lot. What exactly is going on?
There have been four hundred and one documented false reports of this kind since the beginning of the school year back in September. To give you an idea of the magnitude of that growth, In twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, there were sixty nine false reports of this kind. You know, in the fall of twenty nineteen, just prior to the coronavirus shutting so many schools down, there were twenty two reports. Compared to this past fall, there were two hundred and
fifty six. When I was a kid, you know, a generation ago, it wasn't as urgent, that threat didn't seem as real as it actually could be today, whereas now there's generations of kids that are growing up with the specter of violence, real or imagined, hanging over their normal school day. It's the kind of thing that researchers are trying to understand possible effects of trauma on academic work and psychology, emotional health, that kind of thing. It's very difficult in track.
Really, especially when we have a situation now where there are so many school shootings that teachers are being trained, that schools are buying all sorts of equipment to protect kids if this happens. You see things like backpacks that have bulletproof linings in them, and so if somebody calls in a threat, they're going to take it seriously, even if it doesn't sound credible.
You can't be the principal or the teacher who says this isn't happening, because the stakes of being wrong are so high, you know, literally can cost you know, many lives in the event that you're wrong. So the cost of your day being disrupted by an emergency situation is still better than the alternative, you know, in the event that you're wrong about that. There seems to be a few factors at play here. One of them is that one incident like this begets more incidents the copycat problem exactly.
Just like when there's a actual school shooting, there are further threats of other school shootings, you know, real or imagine again around the country that seems to be happening here. What's also happening here is there appears to be more coordination. We know of the FBI is investigating, we know there's all kinds of police forces investigating. Because if there's one incident in say rural New York State, that same county will be affected in multiple schools over span of days.
Then it goes away for a while, it might hit somewhere else, say Texas, Michigan, somewhere in California, and the problem continues to spread in clusters around the nation rather than single schools.
And did they think that this is organized or that this is happening a lot but by a lot of different people, a little bit of both.
There appears to be some evidence that there are individuals doing this within the United States. There have been a number of young people ages you know, sixteen, even a little bit younger up to early twenties calling in fake
threats like this. There's not a lot known about this, but there's also some evidence that people are using voice disguising technology from outside the country trying to influence local police departments within the United States to play on very real and existing fears of violence and schools.
Jeff, you've reported on one school called Granite City High School. Can you tell us what happened there?
On the morning of April twelve, students and teachers in Granite City High in Granite City, Illinois were sitting down for tests and getting ready for SATs, the dreaded college admissions eligibility tests, and all psyched up ready to go. There were about fifteen hundred students on hand that day, plus staff, teachers, and administrators. Everything seemed to be going normally. It was a nice day. When two police helicopters started
floating overhead. Ultimately sixteen law enforcement agencies were on hand. They kind of appeared out of the blue, according to the superintendent. It turns out someone had called in a fake active show to the local police department. Rather than calling nine to one one, they used a non emergency phone line, triggering this response. The police department apparently did not communicate with the school. They appeared at the school
fully ready to go, armed, swept through the hallways. School students were on lockdown, a lot of kids were held in their testing rooms and really going through all of the procedures that you would expect in the event that there was a real event. Ultimately, the police were in and out within a few hours, but still testing was rescheduled. Kids had to go home to their parents. Parents were crying in the parking lot. Community wide disruption, and.
You talked to the superintendent of the school and she was pretty rattled.
She still rattled a few weeks later. She also said, Hey, by the way, this happened before. So while this is the first time in Granite City, this has happened in previous schools in the community. So a lot of the teachers who had prior roles at those educational institutions, this superintendent, they're still being brought back to a negative place in their mind about prior threats like this. They're happening all over the country. Buffalo, New York, just went through a
big cluster of these. The school superintendent there sent out a proactive alert saying, we're aware of this issue popping up all over the US. We know the FBI is investigating, we know that there was a cluster in Nevada, affecting some colleges and universities. We know that in Harvard there were four young men who were held at gunpoint in their dorm by police that thought they were responding to a incident like this.
Jeff, obviously, with this is affecting hundreds of schools, that's a lot of teachers, a lot of administrators. What are you hearing from them about their day to day lives living under this constant threat that they could have their day overturned.
We know that it is exhausting. I spoke with one superintendent who after an incident earlier this month, said that she was crying in her office on what started as a normal day and she saw students running out and embracing their parents. Everyone was crying. You have to remember that a lot of these educators, in particular, are coming off of a really tough couple of years as it is,
thanks to the coronavirus. We know that teachers are dealing with a lot of burnout and oftentimes don't have a ton of resources to begin with, So this really is another layer of pain and difficulty. On top of all of that, local police departments also are trying to get up to speed on a kind of cybercrime that typically has fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI or federal law enforcement. This is a difficult thing to investigate when
some of these fake threats come in. It's using a kind of technology that is not easy to detect by reverse dialing a number, for instance, or trying to locate where someone is. So it's a huge challenge. It's a lot of frustration. It's leading to a more urgency in terms of community collaboration between schools and police departments and practicing for scenarios like this.
Do they have much success in catching people given how hard it is, like in Granite City? Did they ever find out who did it?
No?
We know that police departments in the FBI are investigating this with a lot of urgency. For the hundreds of swatting incidents that have occurred that we know of this year, only a handful of people have been arrested, and often their charge with a kind of mischief or making terroristic threats. There doesn't appear to be a lot of coordination between the suspects who have been arrested over the past few months.
This is a generational problem for the Internet. It used to be that individuals would be targeted with swatting incidents. We know of one guy allegedly who had hacked Amazon's ring doorbells and would phone in fake swatting incidents, and when the police would arrive, they'd be standing outside someone's home and this perpetrator would taunt the police through the ring doorbell, just completely infuriating the officers who thought they were responding to a hostage scenario.
When we come back, swatting has now become a business, Jeff. It's not just individuals who are calling in these false threads. Unbelievably, there are automated swatting services that a person can pay to create a swatting event for them. What is that and how does it work.
There's a kind of technology called voice over IP tech that has been available for years. Essentially, what that allows you to do is disguise your real phone number and use a specific area code so that it looks like you're calling from an area where they're actually receiving the call. A lot of your listeners might be familiar with the kind of spam or marketing calls that already use this kind of thing. That make it more likely that you'll
pick up your phone if it's from a local caller. Concerningly, there are automated services that are available on different kinds of chat apps, in different illicit channels that to essentially launch a swatting incident for you for less than one hundred dollars. In some cases, these services will say that we will dial this school or this business and we will make X kind of threat, and we expect this result to happen, whether it be somebody being arrested, or
oftentimes they imply that someone might be hurt. So it's not quite the level of hiring a hitman, but it is the kind of thing that has had fatal consequences in the past.
You also talked about how some of these calls seem to have originated from overseas, which is a whole different kind of thing. Our investigators looking into the possibility that this is organized threats by foreign governments just looking to cause kind of mayhem in disruption.
There's no indication that we're aware of that there's a foreign government behind this. It does seem like some of this activities is coordinated by people who certainly know what they're doing. What makes swatting a little bit different from a more typical threat is that there's no clear monetary gain if you are launching a swatting incident from overseas,
wherever that might be. What you're essentially doing is creating chaos and confusion and fear in a community, But there's not a lot of extortion that always goes into it, or the kind of sal of stolen information that you might typically expect from a hacking incident. This is a little more nuanced.
I suppose, though. If you're using one of these services to hire someone to create a swatting incident for you, there's no telling where that person is. A lot of the call centers where scams come in, where they try to swindle people out of money, those are based overseas.
That's correct, And we know that a lot of the people who are doing this kind of activity are using virtual private networks, which are a really good way at cloaking your location and ensuring that it's really difficult to identify what kind of computer you're contacting them from or what your true number is. So that's another complicating step for investigators.
So politicians are obviously starting to take notice of this victually locally.
And I want to reassure parents that the State of New York takes us very seriously. It is incredibly, incredibly stressed on our families at this time, and there's nothing we want more than to restore some sense of common normalcy for our kids who've been through so much over the last few years.
What is the response from elected official has.
Been so far panic and a scramble to show that they are paying attention. The solutions, frankly, are difficult to discern how they will make a major difference, But I think that a lot of the goal here is to kind of start a conversation about this larger problem and ensure that schools and administrators and teachers are trained for situations where if they need to be in contact with
the police, they're able to do that efficiently. In some cases, researchers and school safety experts are recommending that schools will go through simple tasks like making sure that everyone knows where the emergency exit is, which isn't always clear, or ensuring that everyone can hear the PA system, or ensuring that a superintendent is able to quickly reach parents to assuage any concerns about an active shooter. Situation and remind them that it isn't real.
As you're reporting on this story, and I imagine you're gonna be writing about it quite a lot, what's the next thing that we should be watching for.
We are trying to understand more about the perpetrators and really the motive behind some of these crimes. We know that when there are teenagers or young people who are behind this kind of thing, a lot of the explanation is that their brains aren't fully developed. You know, it might be more interesting to be standing outside while the police sweep your school than to be sitting in third period and taking an exam that you didn't study for.
There does those seem to be a level of coordination, as you alluded to, that is indicative of a larger problem that we and perhaps you know, more organized police forces with subpoena power don't fully grasp the meaning of yet.
Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
When we come back, we hear from a school superintendent who's had to deal with these swatting events. Our supervising producer, Vicki Vigolina, has two kids in middle school and she's experienced these school swatting incidents twice in the last two months. Along with her husband and kids and all the other parents, teachers and administrators. She spoke to her district superintendent of schools.
My name is Matts Landall and I'm the superintendent of the beacon Cy School District.
Here's their conversation about what actually happens when a threat is called in.
Doctor Landall, you have been leading this district since twenty seventeen. You let it through the outbreak of COVID, you let it through online schooling and the slow but short return to classes. But recently you are, along with many other school leaders around the country, navigating a new sort of chaos, which is these calls to the district involving threats to the schools. What happens when you receive this call, when you receive a threat like this, what has to happen logistically?
Well, the one we got in February, the call actually went into the police department instead of us, and so they were both notifying us that they received the call and rushing over.
To the school to see what was going on or to intervene.
The one we had where recently was like an online comment on an online site, and so that was then forwarded to us. We have a full time director of security in our district and he's pretty much on call twenty four to seven along with us, and so we called him that evening and then he kind of helps us, lease, I'm with the police, and so he immediately started working
with the police. There's a lot of circumstance around how you respond to each one, but you obviously respond immediately and you do kind of trigger all the training and.
Practice and what's in our plan.
What I found over the years in dealing with this and these ones more recently are obviously pretty troubling, but you never know when it's coming and you just respond right away.
And what's great is there's a bunch.
Of other people who kind of have that twenty four to seven part of their job, and so you know, the police are always there no matter what time, and administrators are on call, and we just start working through it.
The last part of it is once you've started to figure out what to do, you start really working on how you communicate it to obviously staff, but also then to parents and how quickly can you do that, And so it's something unfortunately we have a fair amount of practice doing and like I said, everyone is like a little different.
And what has to be established to get sort of that all clear. At what point do you feel confident to communicate to the community, Hey, we're all okay.
You know, there's the securing of the building itself, but then there's the where did this message come from part of it, and so that's something that we would do with the police, and then that's something we can communicate out, and that is, you know, the police going through a building and working with us in terms of making sure the building is entirely secure.
The second part of it.
Is, you know, what they've been able to get a lot better at is they start finding out where the message is from. And this is I think police departments just not even ours, but just sort of all over the place are either doing it themselves or working with state entities or federal entities in terms of tracking down like IP addresses and working with technology social media companies that.
All that kind of stuff.
What I found is they've gotten a lot quicker at finding out where the either the comment or even the phone calls.
Sometimes that's obviously.
Not what I'm involved in it all, but they've been able to do those things really quickly with us this year, and unfortunately, I think it's something they've gotten better at dealing with too. But that part has been a good change. They're able to get to the bottom pretty quickly.
I wanted to ask how well equipped personnel wise school administrators such as yourself and law enforcement. It sounds like you're pretty well equipped to deal with these, but they're ever increasing. Has the personnel had to shift?
Five years ago, it was, you know a few months after the Parkland school shooting. We have security monitors or cards and all of our schools, but we developed the position of directors security.
So that was a change that was kind of.
Not a direct response to the Parkland shooting, but everything we were dealing with that year we developed that position. He's a retired police officer and he's super helpful. Like I said, you know, he's on call twenty four to seven in a sense to help us deal with stuff. So that is a position that probably twenty or thirty years ago, like no school district was even thinking of having.
So that's certainly a new allocation.
We have, you know, different technology, like pretty sophisticated cameras in the schools and security systems and things like that that you know, the status helped pay for, but those are things that districts weren't thinking about having ten or twenty years ago probably either, you know, building principles and people like me spend a lot of time on this stuff too, And I think it's really just kind of become part of the job that day that the more recent thing happened.
It's just like the whole day.
You just sort of lose that day or more with whatever you.
Had planned for that day. And obviously that's part of being a school.
Administrator or superintendent, so I accept that, but there is part of that where it's a newer thing that we deal with, and it does seem more frequent now too.
That's the bit I wanted to also ask you about because the personal aspect of all this, You are so calm and cool in a situation, and I have experienced this personally because I've gotten your robo calls. But when you joined Teach for America and decided that education was your path, did you see this as part of the trajectory.
No, I didn't see that part of it. I mean, my very first year of being an.
Administrator, I was like an intern administrator. Was Columbine and it kind of changed everything. And so every year I've been an administrator, we've been dealing with this in one way or another. You know, these swatting calls are coming from some bad actors, right, and these are kind of for other people to say, but it appears the intent
is to take a toll on people. And I think it takes a toll on parents for sure, and it certainly takes a toll on you know, teachers and staff members and schools, and it takes a toll on administrators. And it takes a toll on our students, like they either get the message themselves or their parents or a teacher if it's during the day, has to figure out a way to talk to them and keep them calm, you know.
So it's like there's two things happening.
One thing is there's real things that happen, real tragic school shootings, and everybody is aware of when they happen, or almost everybody, probably our youngest students are sheltered from it. And so that's in the back of everyone's mind, from student all the way through everyone else in the district, including parents. But then there's these fake incidents that equally take a toll because we have to communicate them, we
have to respond to them. I think in like the following our process communicating about it, it takes a toll on everyone too, because it's like it causes anxiety and it's hard. You know, when I had to make that call at five point thirty in the morning a couple of weeks ago. Obviously I hate to make any of those calls, but I really hated to do that when
we knew it was the right thing to do. We knew everyone needed to know about it, but I also knew, like everyone getting that call that early in the morning, how it was just going to impact several thousand people.
And you know, it's hard to sort of know that everyone's going to either hug their kid a little bit tighter before putting them on the bus, or maybe even some keeping their kids at home that day, or you know, just all those things, or high school students or middle school students talking about what this means for them, and.
Staff members concerned about coming to work.
So that's the part where it feels like whoever's doing all of this, or the people that are doing this, they're taking you know, these real events that happen, and they're just sewing more of this anxiety and fear or trying to And so I should probably end by saying, we really really work hard to really work through these incidents and try to be calm and reassuring, and our staff I think does an amazing job with that too.
We should mention you're also a father and your son is also in the district, so you know, it's all the above for you. Wasn't there an offer of counseling when kids came back, especially after the February one where it was a little bit more intense. Do you want to just speak to that a second, that that's something that districts are doing, that's something that you're doing.
Yeah, in every district budget over the last probably four or five years, we've increased mental health professionals in our district. We're doing it again for next year's budget. And the need is vast out there. I think that's well established.
But that being said, what happened at the middle school that morning there was this swatting call went to the police right at arrival, and so police came over, you know, armed and ready to deal with someone trying to cause harm in the school and so kids saw the police coming out with long guns and fests and everything, and that was a traumatic day for a lot of kids
at the middle school. So and we were able to once we established that it was false and everything, parents were allowed to pick up their kids throughout that day. We kind of put all the district mental health people at the ready for the I think that happened on a Friday, so they were ready on Monday for the return of students. And there was a fair number of kids who took us up on the offer and wanted
to talk to somebody and just talk it through. To try to offer a lot of support is like a way we can all try to get through this together.
Well, thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate your time.
Take care, Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from my Heart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink, and they both produce this episode. Raphael M. Sely is
our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm Weskasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.