Episode 163 - Cyber Attack Liability, Proxies, and Managed Methods

This is K-12 Tech Talk, the podcast by K-12 Techs for K-12 Techs, real conversations, real arguments, and real banter on trending K-12 technology topics and issues. juice. Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk Podcast, episode 163. I am Josh, back from Kosan, no worse for wear.

Mark made a pretty rude comment earlier when I turned on my camera with me tonight is mark hello mark hello and chris is in sunny southern california you know i actually have something in reference to to that to southern california.

Or or chris being in southern california so you introduced us to a website earlier this week josh called UDIO U-D-I-O I did UDIO is my my new favorite tool and you can enter in a couple of prompts and it will write a song and so I wrote a song oh did you about about this situation with Chris being absent today so so yeah Chris is in Southern California with Jason from K12 Tech Pro they're doing a regional meetup in San Diego hopefully that turns out well for them if you're

If you're not aware of K-12 Tech Pro, go check it out. Click the community tab. Join the community. If you can't or don't have a school credit card or can't pay for it, take a sponsored link and Chris will pay for it for you with sponsorship money. It's a great community. I think the last time we talked, there was over 600 people in it. It's a good community. It's a really good community. So go check that out. Well, Mark, we were just talking. It's been it's Thursday.

It's been over a week since I saw you in person, but it was good to see you in person. And we had a good time. Great time. Yeah. Flew through the eclipse, flew through a couple of thunderstorms. That was great. I got to see the totality eclipse. We didn't talk about that down in Florida. Yeah, no, we didn't. Your experience. Yeah, it was a magical time. I saw the video you posted with your friends and you took a different aspect.

Of it yeah and uranus was very clear in that picture you know i really wanted to make sure the picture the camera got a good glimpse of it i wanted to comment on your facebook post so bad i know you know you could you could go ahead and do it it's fine it's fine no so you were part of my inspiration for taking time off and going and seeing it because you know my one of my friends that said oh we should go see the the eclipse the totality and then

and you were the one who was like you saw it last time and you're like it's it is a 2017 yeah it's a different experience and i have to say you know and i was talking to my wife she's like well you know we had like 97 98 it's kind of no it's not the same you're you're either in totality or you're not yeah and man when it It hits like, it's like the environment changes that it just, it's cold that you hear insects. Like it, it's cool. It's, it's, it's really, really cool.

That how long were you in totality? So that was, you know, a little disappointing. We made a decision to go, uh, not as deep into it. So we were only there for about a minute and a half to two minutes still. However, the people who were deep, deep into totality, we were up in northern Vermont. It was a, for what it was normally a two and a half to three hour drive back to Boston was a seven and eight hour drive.

Oh my gosh. We made the decision just to hit the skirt into totality just so we wouldn't get stuck in that traffic. I would not have made it to Miami if we were any deeper. Wow. Did you get a teddy bear while you were in Vermont? No, why? Aren't Vermont teddy bears a thing? Oh, I think so. No, maple syrup is a bigger thing. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I love Vermont. Love Vermont. If we got listeners from Vermont, I love you guys. We do. I'll check. We do. We have at least a couple.

Yeah. So totality, the next one, what? 2044? Man, I do look rough tonight, Mark. It is. Depends on how far you want to travel. Yeah. Yeah, there's one that sweeps, like, again, through the majority of the country and I think most of Florida the next time. I think it's 2044. Oh, yeah. Disney World. Disney World. So, yeah, can you imagine what those Disney tickets will be like? Those Disney World tickets? Probably the most expensive on the record of Disney. Yeah.

Let's see here. So, one of the things that came up in the news was this Clark County thing.

We talked about clark county back in october when it happened i guess late october early november again they were hit by was it singularity singularity md yeah and that was mainly a breach of i guess compromised student accounts and then they were able to access google drive shares with protected information iep information stuff like that and then it got leaked posted So now apparently there is a class action lawsuit from some parents over this and

it's made its way into court and there's been a couple, I guess, movements and. I don't know, motions. I'm not a lawyer. But one of the articles that came across my screen this week was from the Nevada Independent, a paper in Nevada, clearly. The judge says Clark County schools may have immunity in the lawsuit over 2023 cyber breach. Long story short of this is there is a immunity in Nevada state law.

And I checked Missouri has a similar thing. So I I think it's kind of common, called discretionary function immunity. And it's, let's see, the statement says, the law states that no action may be brought against a state agency that is based upon the exercise or performance of, or the failure to exercise or perform, a discretionary function, whether or not that discretion involved is abused. used.

So in other words, what they're saying is the almost, I don't want to say that the normal day-to-day business of a school district, but you know, a school district has to have systems. They have to have online activity. They have to have devices. And the judge is leaning towards the fact that, look, you were attacked. You cannot say that you, you just because you were attacked means that you were liable for this attack.

And the, the parents argument though, the counter argument is that it was the district's negligence that led to this and they're pointing to an attack from two years ago the the interesting part about this though is you know there there's no relation between or no known relation between the two attacks we know that school districts are attacked all day every day so you can't necessarily claim that the first attack led to the second one and that

the district was negligent in in in that and there also there are some arguments in here too that the parents necessarily haven't demonstrated impact or harm as a result of this. Meaning, yes, your students were students in the district, your children were students in the district. There is information that was leaked as a result of this hack. However, you have not demonstrated harm as a result of that breach. Very, very good points on both sides of the argument. The judge,

as you mentioned before, is leaning towards granting the school district immunity. unity. However, they're saying we're going to give both sides of the argument time to argue. Josh, what side are you arguing? You know, from a liability standpoint, I would have to take. Having a vested interest as a school employee, I would have to take the school side, or I could see taking the school side as saying, you know, I think we've even mentioned this before, kind of victim shaming in this.

Because the school is a victim in the same regard that the students are a victim. It wasn't necessary negligence that led to the breach. But on the other hand, if you can prove negligence by an employee or by policy or not following a documented policy, I think the parents have a leg to stand on. I think what the bigger story here is, is what this means for other districts across the country and states that have discretionary function immunity and what this means for lawsuits going forward.

You know, devil's advocate here, if Clark County is able to leverage this and has immunity or is declared immunity for this, does that give fodder to districts to say, look, we have discretionary function immunity, we can spend this thing, this protection is super expensive, we're better off spending that money somewhere else.

Since we have immunity that's not a high priority you understand what i'm saying like does that lead down a road of almost negligence by not yeah funding certain purchases i i think that could that could lead to a very dangerous situation it's a really that's a really hard one to say and i i. Without saying what side of the fence I'm on here, I think I always want to strive to like look at both sides of the argument.

I think from the district's perspective, and you and I are district employees and often find ourselves in similar situations here, there are things that we can do to shore up our systems or to improve. I mean, if you were to ask you or I, like, what are the five things that you need to do? We should be able to label the five things.

If a judge asked me, how come you didn't do those five things? well right you got a point there on the other side of this the offense though this was a direct attack this was this was a bad actor targeting and going after the school districts and it you know it's one thing of like oh i i had a bunch of stuff on a flash drive and i dropped it and all that data got leaked versus we were doing our normal day-to-day business in a in a third party a threat actor came in and attacked

us and stole the data it's very very hard for me to to take either side of things because i do see both sides i i do think though and i think this is just my my kind of i would say my bias we as an industry are under attack the the white house absolutely came out and said it like this is a major issue for all of us we all have to pay attention and I don't know if a class action lawsuit will help or hurt that argument.

The the help is look if we all see that the repercussions of an attack are not just you know us need to spend a lot of money on recovery and all that kind of stuff but also we're gonna have legal repercussions and lawsuits and that could spark some superintendents to take this a little more seriously than they and they currently are but on the contrary.

I'm struggling to put this one into words. Our job is to instruct students. Our job is to teach kids. Yeah. And if we're under attack from all around the world here, there's got to be a much larger response rather than each individual school district mitigating this or litigating this in court with parents. I know the solution, Mark. Just block suspicious IPs.

To your point inside joke to to your point mark i think you know to get back to the statement that you made about if if someone asked you or judge asked you the five things to take care of and you should be able to name the big five things i think the important thing here though is with clark county and in jefferson county public schools in colorado this was a relatively new attack factor, right? Like this isn't one of the five things.

This is leveraging student accounts and student password breaches that have happened probably historically. That's a new methodology to take a breach. Now, once they were in and able to see drive shares, you could argue appropriate drive shares or appropriate default drive shares could be one of your five things that That is important, but this was a completely new methodology of an attack. So I think from an argument from that standpoint, that's an easy argument to have.

I mean, it's a fascinating conversation too around like, I do believe that the next three to four years, hopefully less, the real strong focus on K-12 is around MFA for students. I think you're exactly right. We've talked about this at length. We had Clever on here a couple of weeks ago to talk about their MFA strategy. It has to be a focus. But right now, I don't think that you can put the blame on schools for not rolling out two-factor for students.

No. Because there is very, very little attention on a student-friendly MFA. Yeah. And I'm not going to say, well, you know, we do attack Google and Microsoft quite a lot. You know, if I'm a Google lawyer and a Microsoft lawyer, I say, well, we have MFA, go ahead and use it for your students. No, you know full well that that solution is not designed for K-12. And so it's very hard for me to see this particular attack, this one in particular, and say...

Are there ways that they could have prevented this with student two-factor authentication? Sure. But again, I go back to the mission of school districts is to provide instruction and classroom learning. And right now, two-factor authentication for students impedes that mission. It's a barrier. You know, it's always that conversation of security versus usability.

And and for a student from a two from a student perspective k through probably eighth grade, multi-factor authentication is a huge barrier i think you could have a conversation once they get to high school about using personal cell phones and probably even middle school but it's a barrier otherwise yeah a couple things that came to mind real quick during our conversation here mark you said that you always like to see both both sides of the fence and you try and,

Make yourself aware of both sides of the argument.

A great book for that. If you have not read it from Adam Grant, one of my favorite authors, called Think Again. Fantastic book. I am reading his book Hidden Potential right now that is super awesome. Talks a lot about education. Pick up both of those books. Think Again is absolutely a great book. Another thing, Mark, it is share your drink time. What are you drinking tonight, Mark? This is Fernette. It's an Amaro. I sounded way fancier than I really am.

Saying that right now i'm drinking old elk bourbon podcast fantastic let's let's hit a sponsor real quick since chris isn't here so visor find out how visor can simplify your student vice management and collection we're coming up on device collection time go to visor.cloud v-i-z-o-r.cloud slash k12 tech talk k12 tech talk listeners get a free i'm sorry get special pricing and a free free K12 Tech Talk hoodie.

When I went down and saw the K12 Tech Talk and K12 Pro headquarters down where Chris lives, I got to see the shelves upon shelves upon shelves of K12 Tech Talk hoodies just waiting to be shipped out. So if you want one, get a Visor demo. If you want to find out about how Visor can help with your one-to-one device management, check out visor.cloud, V-I-Z-O-R dot cloud slash K-12 Tech Talk and sign up for one of their demos. Get that free hoodie.

It's not really hoodie season. It was like 85 here today. What else we got to talk about? So we've it's the last, what, five weeks of school graduations in just under a month, which is crazy. Sorry. I mean, we're nowhere near the end of the school year. Oh, that's right. You go to like July 4th. We got two and a half months. Oh, my gosh. Wow. The end of June. That's crazy. I'll be at the lake sink sipping beers in the middle. But I'll text you, Mark, when I'm I will be drinking beers.

I just have to not in the middle of the day like me. No, got to start in the morning if you want to go all day. So, you know, you know, don't take it there, Mark. This is a show for everyone. Where was I going? Oh, last five weeks of school. I'm sure everyone can relate to this. Everybody gets kind of squirrely. Students get squirrely. Teachers get kind of squirrely. So we had a rash of proxy site usage. And I just happened to be in the filter, got a call about something.

So I had to pull a kid's history. And I'm like, why is this kid hitting all of these random business sites? Like they were classified business in our filter. I'm like, what is going on? So I started looking them up and I grabbed a URL, pasted it in my filter. And sure enough, it's a stinking proxy site. So we had to have a conversation with this kid because there was a rash of Chromebooks. Getting wiped or, you know, control shift R. So principal called the kid in and he's like, hey, you know,

let's talk about doing this. We're in the middle of state testing. This isn't a good idea because they got to be re-enrolled, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're having a conversation and principal introduces me to the kid. You know, he's the director of technology, blah, blah, blah, blah. The kid looks me and we're talking middle school kids. So like seventh, eighth grade, this kid was probably, let me think what device he had. He was seventh grade.

So he looks me dead in the eye. Now think seventh grader, you know, short little kid. The kid was hilarious. He like, I was loving his interaction with the principal. He looks me dead in the eye and says, man, do you know, have you, have you heard of these sites called proxy?

Do you know what a proxy is? is and i had to giggle and respond i'm like yeah man i i was around when proxies were invented like i i installed a proxy server at my first job so everyone in the hospital could get out to the web like don't don't come at me with have you heard of this thing called a proxy server, when was that that would have been because i'm i'm gonna tell you where i was when that happened Oh, I'm sure you were in grade school.

That would have been around 99, right around 99, 2000, somewhere in there. Where were you, Mark? I mean, I was in school. Okay. Are we talking elementary school, post-secondary? I think I was in high school at the time. Yeah, I was in high school at the time. I was working on my first job. Okay, so we're not that far. That's not far apart. Still, it made me feel really old. This kid's like, have you heard of proxy? Yeah, man.

I know what proxies are. But all of that to say, I don't know how often you get in your filter, Mark, to look and see at top site downloads and stuff. So that got me down a rabbit hole the next day or two. randomly at the end of the day, I would hop in our, our Chromebook filter and do a sort on top utilization from sites on bandwidth. And I was finding like five, six sites a day that were all classified as business sites.

And they're, they're hosting sites, right? Like they're just, you can spin up a stack and and host a proxy in it and i'm i'm blocking sites left and right have you guys have you have you had this problem do you know this i mean we all know this problem exists it's like whack-a-mole right like i'm gonna block these five sides tomorrow there's five more yeah it's a losing battle so it's it's hard i mean even sites that like are not intended to be proxies become proxies.

Archive.org was my favorite trick that the kids discovered. You can go, I don't know about you, but early on we could go to archive.org and say show me porn.com yesterday. And it worked. I've never been there, Mark. I'm sorry. Archive.org or porn.com? Man, Chris isn't here. We could have so much fun. Oh!

So that got us That got me in a conversation with a couple other tech directors about blocking non-standard top-level domain. Now, yeah, I was a glutton for punishment and blocked .io a while back. And that didn't last real long because a lot of legitimate sites are hosting CDNs on .io sites.

But a couple of the sites I found this week, one of them was a .2, which that's the country abbreviation for Tongo maybe and then one of them was a dot CL I think so around that idea, Is it a good idea to block non-standard top-level domains, or would you be better off creating a list of top-level domains to block, like .to, .cl? What are your thoughts? I know it becomes unwieldy to manage, but that's where all these sites live. Okay, so I'm going to share a personal story here. Oh, here we go.

I think I've mentioned this. My wife is a teacher in the district. Yes. And I'm going to keep my voice down so she doesn't come in here.

She calls me up and i can't always answer during the day but she bypassed the help desk when she needs help that's a that's a separate episode of like does my wife call the help desk or not, the answer is yes but in this circumstance she went straight to me she called me and some of her students they were doing a class project or some students got a a pop-up that had pornographic images and i've censored exactly how my wife described this too by the way and i

was like okay i i don't know what's going on just send me an email like what site they were going to all that kind of stuff and she sends me this website it was like a website that converts youtube to mp3 oh yeah yeah yeah and the domain was something i had never recognized before and it was like a country or an island off Sweden that I'd never heard before.

And so I had to explain to her like, okay, the very, very end of the website, if you don't recognize it, you need to be extra cautious with it. And so obviously we, you know, we took the steps of blocking that website, but that conversation came up and like, do we block this random country that's hosting these weirdly odd sites that are probably half legal and half not?

Right. I don't, I don't have a a solid answer to it i think your your natural intention is like when these kinds of things come up is to like just just block it all and sure for any any issues to pop up there are so so many out there yeah and i don't know what's legit or not if we just start with a like i'm gonna allow dot com dot org dot io and then allow people to request others or do we play whack-a-mole Well, and I think it's different per situation, right?

Like my district is much smaller than yours, and I guarantee that you have a much higher incident of legitimate traffic going to a random top level domain of another country than I would. So blocking those nonstandard, specifically country top level domains probably would be harder for you than it would be for me. But yeah, it's, it's, it's gotten ridiculous. And yeah.

And you know, in the last couple of episodes, we've had this like kind of a brief conversation about the difference between a large and small district. One of the things I'm really jealous about in a small district, because you are so local to the users, to your teachers and students, is that if, if a teacher needs something unblocked, they walk down the hallway and ask you, that doesn't happen with me. Like there is no walking down the hallway. way.

It's, you know, then it's dependent on like, does the teacher trust I can call the help desk and get what I need? Yes or no. And a lot of times, you know, they're like, nah, I'm just not going to call the help desk. Oh, hey, cool. Here's a proxy. Let's just figure that this is

a good way around it. Yeah. So, but I will say we've had to, we've had to put procedures in place because of complaints and shenanigans, you know, that we were playing favorites and that I wanted to be removed removed from the decision-making process. So anytime there is a request for a website to be unblocked, we create a ticket for it, create a ticket, and then we kick that request to the principal so that they're in the loop.

They're the one making the decision on whether or not that's an educational resource. They say yes, no. We then flip the switch, yes, no. I wanted to be be removed from that decision making process for you know so that we couldn't be claimed that we were playing favorites or something like that who are you uh who are you playing favorites to nobody i don't like anyone so it's yeah we've also talked about that over the last few episodes.

Yeah well yeah oh whatever uh your wife is not a staff in your district though not in my district no okay no but she does she does she goes directly to her it department because they're they are in her building so she she just walks into the department's like hey steve but yes she said steve's not there anymore okay let's do another sponsor real quick howard they are relatively new to us, email Seth Shockley, S-Shockley, S-H-O-C-K-L-E-Y, at howard.com.

Howard, they pride themselves on being a one-stop shop for all your technology needs from computing, audiovisual, networking, physical security, cybersecurity, and beyond. We can find a solution that works for you and your environment. We have some great new pricing from New Line Interactive and TSN Digital Signage and HP Poly. So email Seth if you want some information from Howard about those products. It's spring, and it feels like every spring the big yellow cable finders come out.

And we had an incident of that this week. There was a bulldozer on campus. We're getting her to add on to a building. And they quickly found rainbow roots and even rarer rainbow root, which is the one that carries 120-volt electricity to light poles. They found that with a bulldozer. So, yeah, that was fun. Are they are they OK? Oh, yeah. You're not hurting this bulldozer. Yeah. Maybe I should specify this. The guy inside the bulldozer is here.

Well, by the time I got over there, the principal called me because it killed the security camera. And by the way, like I said, is are they OK? And you're like, bulldozer is fine. And like, what about the guy? And you're like, well, there's a story here. He's dead. He's dead. No, he was fine. The principal called me. I got over there and the bulldozer like he was he was still in the bulldozer and it was running. He was kind of slumped over, but, you know, I assumed he was.

No, he was fine. He wasn't. His hair was totally frazzled. Yeah. And it's funny because we were standing there with the site superintendent for the construction job. And I'm like, yeah, you know, you might want to go check the breaker and make sure that breaker tripped when you when it snapped this one, this 120 line. And the superintendent's like, don't worry about that. That bulldozer can run over that all day long. It won't hurt it.

I'm like, and the principal goes, yeah, but we have middle school kids running around here and all I need is for one of them come grab it. So yeah.

It's yeah construction is i hate i just don't enjoy construction because something always happens like that we broke our we had our main internet line broken by a bobcat one time i know i worry about that like we have very very antiquated infrastructure in in town and so every time spring comes around and the bulldozers start digging in they get the they get the green light to start road construction that's when

it gets that's when it gets ugly yeah there's always construction in your town, right? Always. Always. What else you got, Mark? I got nothing. You got nothing? What the heck? I think we need an interview. We do, but let me talk about Xtreme and Fortinet real quick. I actually saw the folks from Xtreme today. I saw Dominic today. There was a meeting in St. Louis that I attended with a bunch of St. Louis schools and got to shake Dominic's hand.

If you want to know more about Xtreme networks and what Xtreme has on the horizon, what they can do for cybersecurity, stuff and your security stack. You know, the big conversation today was VLANs aren't enough. You need ACLs. You need, you know, it'd be good to have a NAC. Email Dominic, D-Mayor, M-A-Y-E-R at extremenetworks.com. The other sponsor we have for tonight is Fortinet. You know, they do everything.

Firewalls. There are actually several of the schools that I was with today, there were probably 15 schools in the meeting and several of them are looking at or have installed FortiVoice, the phone system from Fortinet. I found that pretty interesting. So if you want information on FortiVoice, Fortinet firewalls, FortiGates. For the EDR or to whatever else. Email our buddy Chris over at Fortinet podcast at Fortinet dot com.

Crystal has this email address. Is there a is there a for the phone number they can call? I just have a for the email. That's a for the mouthful that that is. I need to use the the for the potty when we're done here. Sorry, had to. It's Mark's fault. He baited me into it.

I've had some for the booze tonight. night this is what happens when chris doesn't yeah for the bourbon and for tomorrow yeah because chris is out in 40 diego for us skipping out on the ford podcast ford of ford yeah that's i was going there too mark we won't he's a man of god we can't do that next hey chris oh we're glad you're You're gone. Let's talk politics now. I need a nap.

Oh, man. Oh, man. Let's see. A4L conference in D.C. coming up at the end of the month. Go out there. See what A4L and Steve Smith and those folks have cooking all things DPA data privacy. There's going to be quite a few folks there. Several, I think, Department of Ed might be there. So go check that out if you are in the area or if you want more information about the Student Data Privacy Consortium and what A4L can help you do.

Next, coming up, we have an interview with Managed Methods. Chris did this interview, and Managed Methods has been with us for a while. So it is their folks talking about what they can provide and what they can offer you. Take a listen. Sure, we haven't dropped the email address. Fortinet, Fortinet, Podcat. Oh, my goodness. K12TechTalk at gmail.com. We're on Twitter. What else? We got some exciting news coming up. We're about ready to hit 100,000 downloads, right, Mark?

Yeah, that's it. We are super close. No, we're not there. Okay. We're like 700 away, I think. But we have some cool announcements, some cool changes coming when we hit 100,000 downloads. I think Chris said we get checks for $100,000 when that happens. Did he tell you that? I missed that Florida message, but okay. That's past. It's past. It's past.

Okay. Sorry. Sorry. We beat it into the ground. I got a four to sober up. You got a four to edit. So yeah, email us, share us with your friends. Go find us on K12 Tech Pro. Mark and I are both rather active over there. And have a listen to this episode from Managed Methods. Thanks for listening. All right. I am hanging out with David with Managed Methods. David, how's it going? It's going well. How are you doing today, sir? Not too bad. We just started spring break.

We were talking about that before I jumped on the call and hit the record button with you. You're finishing up your spring break. Correct. Our spring break has been this whole week, and my kiddos go back to school on Monday. Well, I've been having the whole week be a big old thing of hype. Literally just got our spring break started about two minutes ago, and I thought I could start it no better than to hang out with you and Manage Methods.

Well, outstanding way. Yeah. What a happy hour. Get it started the right way. Well, I think most listeners know, but would you tell us in a nutshell or talk as long as you want, but would you tell us what is Managed Methods? We're a 24 by 7 monitoring platform that sees everything that's going on inside of your email, your file shares, a Zoom meeting, a Google Meet, a Microsoft Teams.

So if you think about it, Chris, and you're obviously very well versed in Every school district out there in K-12 today is either on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 or both for their primary communication and collaboration every day. We're talking email, whether it's Gmail from Google, whether it's Outlook.com through Exchange Online with Office 365. And then file sharing behavior, whether it's Google Drive, shared drives, classroom, Google Meet, on your Google Workspace side of the world.

On your Microsoft side of the world, you're dealing with OneDrive, OneNote, SharePoint, Teams.

Here at Managed Methods, constantly monitoring that environment for them and taking proactive steps to keep them safe and secure, whether that's through DLP measures, whether that's preventing unauthorized file shares, whether it's somebody typing into the chat in the Google Classroom or getting so granular as to say, hey, you know, Chris and David are, you know, leading this Google Meet and we can get an audit record of everybody that attended,

when they logged in, when they logged out, who turned on their camera, who shared something to get that granular information. Then the visibility is tremendous. And then we can create rules to alert people, notify, revoke, say that, hey, you can't install this third-party app because it's not approved, quarantine something, notify a user. So it's extremely granular.

And we can say and we can know and we can debate and banter about that there are other solutions that can compare or may look similar to managed methods. What would you say makes managed methods stick out? What sets it apart? Well, I think, number one, what sets us apart is we are extremely unique in that we're the only purpose-built K-12 platform. You know, there's certainly native tools available from Google and Microsoft that are really good, whether they're free or paid versions.

But, you know, the Google tools are just for Google. The Microsoft tools are just for Microsoft. And they don't go as deep as we do and as broad when it comes to your feature functionality set. So, for example, student safety. You have a lot of tools out there that are focused on student safety, maybe at the browser or the device level, but that's all they're doing is student safety.

They're not doing any cybersecurity, DLP, compliance, risk management, etc. And then you have tools that are focused on, you know, case in point, I was just talking to another school district earlier today. Day. I won't mention the vendor, but they're looking at a very well-known DLP solution that is really more of a commercial type of platform, a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. But they were very clear in that, yeah, it's not really K-12 driven.

So the fact that our platform is, again, purpose-built for the K-12 audience and brings a single pane of glass for. Not only monitoring, DLP, remediation control, malware threats, etc., but we also then bring in the student safety asset. That does make us fairly unique. If I'm a school district and I'm wanting to check out managed methods, I mean, can I do a demo for a while? Do I just sit through a webinar? What's the best way for me to get started to learn more and to dig in?

We're not just trying to do demos and pitch our product. In fact, we hardly do that. We spend most of our time, airtime as I I call it, bringing thought leadership on timely topics and bringing our peers and your peers out there. So when you look at our webinars, every other webinar we do, we try to have an audience and a panel or a guest member of a tech director, somebody that's a CTO or a CIO or a director of technology or a system admin in the school district.

And to your point about how to try it out, we have not only recorded demos on our website, a great YouTube channel to see demonstrations, But you can schedule your own private demonstration and Q&A session with any member of my team. But you can also just sign right up for a free trial at managemethods.com of either one of our products, our award-winning flagship product, Cloud Monitor, as well as our new web filtering cloud monitoring product called Content Filter.

You can sign up for a free trial. And as a part of that, it's a 30-day free trial out of the box, no obligation, no credit cards required. You don't have to go set up proxies or gateways or agents or change the way things operate in your business. Your district will operate normally. And as a part of that, our team will do a free risk and security assessment of your environment for you.

So that's how pretty much everybody gets started with us is they take a look-see at the platform through the free trial at the end of it. Some folks say, Hey, I think we're in a good shape, but we appreciate what you've given us is some visibility and insight to our environment and off we go. Awesome. All right. So if you're listening, check out our podcast description, you can click on the link to manage methods or just go to managemethods.com,

to learn more. Thanks, David. Hey, you're quite welcome.

The views and opinions expressed in the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh, Chris and Mark and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations that we're affiliated with. The material information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Music.