¶ Intro / Opening
All right. I am here. I am Chris, and I am here with Mark. Mark, what's up? Hello.
¶ Introduction to the Symposium
So this is going to be a pretty quick episode. We just finished the Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium. Mark, you flew all the way from Boston.
To St. Louis.
To St. Louis. And I guess I told you the wrong airport because there was a better one to use.
Yeah. Yeah. You didn't tell me that there's an airport in the town that the conference was happening. That's my bet.
That's my bet. Yeah, so Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium, which also serves as the K-12 Tech Pro Regional Meetup for the Midwest. It's in the middle of March, right? And you were in the kind of middle of Missouri and Columbia. We had like 160 attendees, had a bunch of sponsors. So we're just going to take a second or two to unpack the conference, talk about the hot topics and issues that were brought up, and then we're going to get out of Dodge.
And we have a cool interview with SaferWatch. They've been hanging out with us. That's going to be at the end of this episode as well.
¶ Conference Highlights and Sponsors
So before we really dig into this, we want to say thank you to our sponsors of the Security Symposium, but in particular to NTP, Lightspeed, Classlink, Fortinet. They were there. We got to hang out with them there, but they've also supported the podcast for a while now too. So check them out. So yeah, let's talk about the conference a little bit, Mark.
Uh day one uh we had uh some like workshop things going on and ntp was there with uh chasing rooks on k2 tech pro and we talked about they did two hours of instance response planning and then they went through playbooks for two hours i think i saw you in there a little bit for some of that um what do you think should schools have should we be worried about incident response?
Well, no, no. I think you should just kind of throw that off the side. You're never going to have any more incidents. It's cool. We're done with that. No, Jason Rooks did a great workshop. I think what I really liked about it is the first part of the workshop was all about why and the how. And so he gave, he had like a whole bunch of different templates for incident response plans.
And the whole thing was just about like, we hear about it, we go to conferences, we learn about them and we learn that we should be doing them. We never set aside time. And so it was all about workshop time and giving people time to work with each other, either within their districts or with other districts and build out their incident response plan. And he made a very, very accessible way of doing so by saying either use the one you've got.
And there was a bunch of districts that had their incident response plan in various, uh, states of maturity. And then they said, if you don't have one, here's a whole bunch of templates for you to work with. And people worked throughout the day. It was, it was a really, really cool session.
Yeah, it was, uh, I know there was one particular person that sat there almost for the entire four hours, that session and the second one, uh, It was kind of off to the side a little bit. Didn't like really engage with everybody else, but that's okay. Yeah. Because he said that at the end of the four hours, he was like finished. Like he had pretty much his plan ready, which was this great reminder.
Like we just need time. We need isolated time or time with our team to sit down and knock some of these things out.
¶ Incident Response Workshops
Yeah. I know the second session was like running different playbooks and Did you sit through any of that or no?
I did not, no. Was that the hunt or the capture the flag?
No, it was with Rooks and NTP again. I think they ran. It was like different scenarios. Like, okay, now you have your plan.
Got it. Okay.
Let's run some things. Yeah, next door, though, was some capture the flag stuff, which I know a lot of people geeked out on that. And Winston and Steve put that thing on, and it was awesome.
Can you describe what it was? Because I expected, when you say capture the flag, I just expected a whole bunch of people to be like running around the conference.
Trying to get a little piece of cloth. Yeah. So they came with a like physical computer server. Yep. Really fun too, because we use the hotel's, shout out Stony Creek, Columbia. We use the hotel's wired connection, their wireless, and there may or may not have been like a network tester plugged into the wall and they like figured out what VLAN it was on and if we could connect with the wireless to it as well. And they did a little bit of rigging up.
That sounds cool. I'll skip over some parts. Yeah. I saw things I shouldn't have seen. So anyways, you came in and you connected and they had like this thing, like this is what you're trying to do. This is what you're trying to accomplish with this computer. And then they had like a leaderboard thing rolling and you were just giving, I think it was like 20 plus. Different like challenges of trying to like, you know, decrypt this file and get to this thing and do this thing.
And they gave out the NTP coins that we do on K12 Tech Pros that went along. And then you unlock this final thing at the end. It's pretty cool. It's like, I think it's pretty. I was telling those guys, I think if you've never done one, I think it's intimidating to walk into the room for the first time. Okay. But then you sit down, your neighbors are going to help you along a little bit to get you started, to give you exposure.
Basically, you're getting some exposure to what the bad guys might be doing or different tools to look at.
¶ Keynote Sessions and Insights
Anyway, that was day one. Day two was all of our sessions and some keynotes. So we did two keynote things. One was with Julian and Eric, and that was what we learned from CrowdStrike. So they, big school district in Missouri, they got hit with the CrowdStrike incident. CrowdStrike was at our July conference, and we cracked a bunch of CrowdStrike jokes. It was beautiful. And then they were at this conference as well.
And I'm sure their hearts skip a little bit when they walk in and see that they're like the keynote. But they weren't invited to be a part of the keynote. But it wasn't really blame on CrowdStrike. Uh, how the keynote played out. It was this bigger picture thing, uh, as well. What are, what are some takeaways you had from it?
Um, they did a great job and it was, it was all about, um, how they responded during that day, but they, they told the story in the context of this is what you need to be prepared for. And this is what you need to plan for. So, um, they had some lessons around again, instant response planning and the importance of it.
Um, they also, I, I at least took away that the value of an instant response plan is that when you are hit with an instant like that, like CrowdStrike or maybe something worse, the easy stuff is already taken care of. You've got your phone numbers listed out. You know who to call. You know what basic steps to take. Because their whole point was that the CrowdStrike one was really, really unique. And a lot of it was trying to figure out what's up, what's down.
Julian talked about that, you know, they're logging into CrowdStrike or logging into their systems and they knew what was down. And then as soon as the update hit Julian's computer, it was also taken out. So like that idea of staying flexible and using your instant response plan to take care of the bare bones things so you can focus on the unexpected. That was, it was great. It was very well done.
Yeah, the two like, you know, like little nuggets it's like, To think about having a computer, that's the computer you're going to use when the world is ending around you. Yep. Because like you said, he was using a computer that had CrowdStrike on it. Right. So he got going and then it got the update. That's just a little nugget, like a different computer than what has all the traditional stuff of what you have within your district.
And then a second thing he said that hit me pretty good was to have a paper copy of your plan with all the phone numbers. And I do that, but it's actually it's in two places at the school. And he just mentioned like backpack or at home. And I hadn't really thought through what that might look like, because it might be the 2 a.m. phone call. Yeah. And now, you know, what are you going to do? Are you going to take the trip into school right away? Or do you need to do some instant stuff?
Remotely. So just two little nuggets of whatever there. The rest of they played out a bunch of sessions. I wanted to barely touch on this one and then we'll jump into the interview, I think. But Google was in town. Google hung out with us. Several things from that session that I just, my school as example, we've just spun up our AI committee. We're going to try to land on what tools we support as a district. Can a teacher do a support ticket with tech department for ChatGPT?
Yes, no. We need to figure that out. Google Gemini continues to be this, I mean, quickly changing, getting better thing like most systems are being, but he showed off. So the theme was Jurassic Tech at our conference.
And cool was we had people bring in old tech a bunch of old apple computers there was a morse code thing uh well he had jim and i on his phone of course uh just showed jim and i to the room jim and i was like it looks like you're at a technology conference uh and he was like jim and i what is this uh and showed some of the stuff that was on the stage and he was like that's lotus notes software from the 1980s that was great for note taking wow and that that's super cool All right.
¶ Google Innovations in Education
And you can think about what that could begin to look like with students and with teachers, where the future is heading kind of thing.
That's very, very cool.
He showed the Gemini prompts like make a Taylor Swift science lesson. All that stuff I think is really neat. There's some interesting stuff with the future. And it's exciting to see Google and the other big boys. They're thinking about it in K-12. Yeah. I think is my quick takeaway from that session. Cool. He showed the security investigation tool stuff that I know we banter about quite a bit as well, too.
Awesome.
And that was the conference pretty much. At the end, and we're going to post this. Actually, when this episode drops, this might already be out. This is going to be within K12 Tech Pro. We did a survey with attendees, a top 15 list. Last year, when we did our meetups, we basically had a top 10 list of things that we think a school should have with data governance and cybersecurity. So we polled the room of attendees.
It grew into a top 15. But we're going to post this report of percentages of kind of the state of Missouri, of the Midwest, where things are at. And there's some surprising numbers on there. Our area, I'll just give a little teaser, way high numbers on SPF, DKIM, DMARC, email security, for example. It was... Obvious, but you also are concerned. The one question that had 100% was, do we all have patching in place that is a regularly scheduled thing?
¶ Survey Results and Findings
That was everybody. But there were some things in there. And again, we'll post this to Pro, but local admin rights still have some work to do. Staff MFA still have some work to do. And those are two concerning things that you wish it was 100%. All right, Mark, anything else for the good of the cause?
No, thank you for having me, Missouri. It was great to be out to Columbia. I'd never been there before. Funny story, I drove past the zoo, the Missoula, Missou, I almost said Missoula again. Missoula, Montana. No, Missou football stadium where my dad used to play football in college. So that was cool to see and I was able to connect with my dad about his experiences in Columbia. Yeah. And then super cool. Yeah. And the hotel, you said, be prepared.
¶ Reflections on the Conference
I was prepared.
I thought I was prepared. I did not expect there to be a hot tub next to my bed.
It's like a winter retreat. We call it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the Midwest tech talk winter retreat.
So all good.
¶ Interview with SaferWatch
All right. Up next is an interview with Safer Watch. Check out saferwatchapp.com. If you do check them out, click request a demo and mention us. But here's that interview. It's a good one. All right, so I'm hanging out with SaferWatch. I got Sam Ambrose, who is a representative with SaferWatch. Sam, how's it going?
It's going good, Chris. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me on today.
For sure. And then Alan Smith is with us. He's the safety director at Winfield Schools in Alabama. Alan, how are you doing today?
Doing great.
So I guess this is probably the sixth episode that we unpack Safer Watch. And we always like to try to get in an interview towards the end or at the end because we fumble the ball all through the six episodes. We talk about Safer Watch, but we want to make sure our listeners know well what Safer Watch is, what it does. And Sam was talking to your team. And of course, it makes sense to have someone using Safer Watch come on.
So before we talk to Alan too much, Sam, would you just give us kind of a quick little history about SaferWatch? What do you guys do? That kind of thing? Sure.
Thanks for asking. So SaferWatch, we're headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We are a mobile and panic button solution for both emergency and non-emergency types of communications. Today, we're in 32 states and growing. We're in six of the top 12 school districts nationwide and growing. We're in places of worship, hotels, malls, hospitals, you name it. The crux, really the foundation of Safer Watch started right after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.
And the company's roots are kind of founded in tip and threat notification directly to law enforcement.
Okay so um what what it really i don't know if you guys know the the quick i'll give you the quick history the person that committed that act of violence the pulse nightclub was not their first destination they were targeting a tourist destination in orlando you can probably figure out which one and when he got there and basically saw a bunch of armed guards he was deterred and he chose a lesser secure target.
I don't know why he chose that particular place. But after that incident happened, I mean, you think about you're in a closed environment, people with no communication, no way to get out other than try to call 911. And the founders of our company, Gino and Shannon, basically figured out there had to be a better way to report an incident. Then, fast forward to Valentine's Day a few years later in our backyard. We're in Broward County, Florida.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is 15 minutes from the office. You all know what happened there. It was horrific. And on the heels of that. There's a law now in Florida. There's a law in seven states across this country, and there's eight more trying to get it approved right now.
But the law is called Alyssa's Law. And the law basically states any public K-12 has to have the ability to report an incident to 911 without dialing 911 and has to have that ability to send text, photo, video in real time to a PSAP or to a 911 operations center. That's one of the things SaferWatch does. That's probably one of the best things SaferWatch does.
And I was telling one of our folks here today, you know, thank God that our ownership, you know, with Gino and Shannon had the foresight to do that because it is a point of difference for SaferWatch to directly connect to 911. And, you know, Chris, I don't know if you've ever called 911 or, you know, when I get into a conversation with folks, I ask them, hey, look, have you ever called 911? So I'm going to ask you, Chris, have you ever called 911?
Yeah, I think. I'm trying to think if it's been once or twice. Yeah.
So, you know, when you call, you go through this interview, 911, what's your name, what's your emergency, what's your address? Well, SaferWatch takes that interview time period away. Because when somebody uses our mobile application, we have basically emergency panic buttons on a phone and we have hardwire, I'm sorry, physical panic buttons.
But when someone uses a panic button, the 911 operator knows who you are, they know where you are, and they know what type of emergency without talking, right? It's all kind of reported in there. And then the other problem that we solve is that when somebody calls 911, only two people know it's happening.
The person calling and the 911 operator. Well, when you use SaferWatch in real time, like if I'm a teacher and I'm in Allen's school and I've got SaferWatch on my phone and there's an incident, I push my panic button. Multiple people know in real time. 911 operator, police, fire, EMT, all the teachers, all the administrators, students if we get into the PA.
And that's another issue that we've seen time and time again in some of these horrible incidents taking place across the country, that there's not enough correct communication at the right time. And the way our system works, within three seconds, multiple people know in real time.
Yeah.
So at a very high light, that's what Save for Once does.
Yeah, and thanks for talking about, and I see it on the website too, the info about Alyssa's law. And if you're listening and you're not familiar with that, that's kind of one of those things. I'm out of Missouri, and there are a lot of times that there's these laws that get put into play, and schools can kind of be a little bit behind on recognizing.
It's not that we don't recognize the importance of school safety, but we don't recognize always that there's this law in place that we need to be thinking about our interfaces that should tap into our phone system to comply with that law. Saferwatchapp.com is where you're going to go. And I've been mentioning over these episodes, too. I mean, there's like eight different things that you guys do high level. So I think with that said, let's get into this a little bit.
Alan, would you talk about, I guess, you know, why Saferwatch? What made you start to go down the lane of Safer Watch?
Well, with all the school shootings in the nation, I just got to Google and trying to see, you know, what we could do to make our school safer. And so it was actually after the Georgia shooting and they had similar. It was in place about, I think, a couple of weeks before.
And so i i talked with the safer watch people and uh we we really got it for the emergency panic button we have hard buttons at all of our schools but uh since we have uh put it in place uh it's helped us with a lot more it helped us helps us with staff assist we've had several seizures on campus uh we get medical people there uh quicker uh it was really more we get more than what we thought we wanted emergency panic but we have uh so much more as far as medical and staff assist okay
Would you talk just for a second about the panic button thing like do you put that at your like is that at each office i guess or what does that do
We have one at each school we have it not really in the office but in a secure place so if someone comes up we could get to it but all of our principals uh and administrators could initiate it you know through their phone on safer watch which would lock the school down the problem we had was lack of communication we have three schools one school may be in lockdown other two don't know it and they're they're close yeah so uh now if we have a lockdown
it notifies the other schools of course it notifies the police and it uh time is everything during the shooting and it cuts down our response time okay
So talk to me more about that. So there's an app that's going on employee phones, faculty, staff phones, and then they have the buttons as well. Is that how your environment is?
Yes sir the mercy uh out they can uh put active shooter hit that button for three seconds it's going to send it out to every teacher on campus uh so you know and it's going to send their location so if i'm a teacher and uh and it goes out i know where that person is close to where if i can get locked down if i have to run hide fight you know it uh it increases our response time you know okay
Awesome um would you unpack just a little bit what was that implementation like uh so this is mostly tech folks that listen would you talk about like the buttons themselves um what kind of hardware like did you do cable runs or wireless or what and then what about that app install
Yes sir they uh it was gonna be i think first of the year before we could get it installed for the time but we actually got it by thanksgiving uh they've done a great job they uh walked us through it i had no idea how to do anything and uh we actually got it up and running uh the customer service is really what makes safer watch i think uh if i call they helped me with that problem that day we had we really didn't have any issues but we got it uh installed real quick and you know it
really helps our system great
And I guess you've done some different drills with your faculty and staff with that. They've been pretty receptive to SaferWatch.
Yes, sir. Before we went online with it, we tested everything. We tested all the emergency buttons with 911, with the police. We didn't just open it up. We went through all the test systems that SaferWatch helped us with, and we made sure we had no issues before we went live with it. But it was actually a real quick process.
¶ Implementation of SaferWatch
You know to get it up and running cool
So i know so there's like anonymous tip reporting there's the threat reporting um is there anything else alan that you're doing like with the like beyond the panic button like you mentioned the staff assist i i guess are you using the other modules in this as well or is that something that you're looking at
Yes we we have like the panic emergency button which is medical which would go to you know the ema go to the emergency people yeah but we have a local uh emergency button which is a staff assist so if someone hits see it it notifies our nurse our administrator and they can get there this uh morning we had a a student had a seizure it's uh it's really important anyway it gets us there very quick and lets us be aware of what's going on i
really didn't um think that we'd use that that much but it's been a big uh big for us
That's what, again, over these last several episodes, well, I'll quick read through it because I've chugged through these several times. Anonymous tip reporting, threat reporting, incident management, drill tracking, threat assessment, mobile panic alert system, mass notification alert system, reunification and safety check-in. The guys we've talked quickly about, that's a lot in one app.
And I think we're more used to it at our schools doing some of those different pieces, but with different programs. So kind of cool and makes it stick out as a different lane of a product, of a service that you're doing all this from one particular service, one particular company.
Yeah. And I would mention, since we're talking IT, I mean, we've got about 70 different integrations today.
Okay.
Because we'll have somebody ask us, hey, we use single wire for this. Can you integrate with that? Yes. Hey, we use XYZ, whatever the case may be. So we do integrations. We don't charge clients for integrations, really, depending on what it is. It's just if they're other third party that they're using charges, that's one thing. But SaferWatch, traditionally, unless there's something crazy off the charts, we don't charge for that.
We want to integrate with other systems because if that's what our clients want, we want to be able to make them happy and keep them happy.
Awesome that's really all that i had alan is there anything else that you would want to share about your experiences with safer watch
Well we had we here we have to be good steward of their money so we looked at getting something we wanted to get something that we felt like that you know of course would help us but uh the price of safer watch and the customer service to me sells it uh they've been great for us and my superintendent has presented to the board several times and bragged on our system that we went with safer watch and uh the alabama is going to be in
the next uh several years like you said they're going mandatory have i have to have a hard button and so we're actually ahead of the chat head of it so uh they've been great for us yeah
And what a good thing to be ahead of in that safety um that's this this whole deal too so we talked about this list of all stuff again We don't want safe schools just because it's law. We want safe schools because we want safe schools. So whether or not Alyssa's law is applying to your state or not, this is for sure something to check out to get ahead of. Sam, do you have anything to add? Yeah.
I would just say, I mean, it's helping just communicate. I think everybody knows what the problem is. I don't think there's one simple solution to the problem. Although I will tell you this because Alan mentioned the Georgia shooting that took place in September. And I was watching, I don't know what news outlet I was watching, but one of the parents, Mr. Schachter, his son also perished at MSD.
They asked him, hey, look, with things the way that they are and politics the way that they are, what do you think the best way is to solve this problem? And he said, what we've seen over the past several years is that advanced tip and threat notification and people, you can use the app as a student. Students don't get access to a panic button, but a student could use the app. It's free to download to a report, a tip or a threat directly to law enforcement as a known or as an anonymous person.
And I talked to a group today that had an incident a year or so ago. And I asked them, hey, why do you think the students didn't report it? They didn't follow that. If you see something, say something. We like to say, if you see something, send something. But when they interviewed the students later, they said, look, we didn't want to be known as a narc.
Well, there's an anonymous feature in Safer Watch where if I see somebody post something on Snapchat, like a picture of a gun and I watch out ABC school tomorrow, they can report it and they wouldn't know exactly who it is. But the people that need to get the information can get the information and take action.
Awesome.
¶ The Importance of Reporting Tools
And that's another big feature. Sometimes I tell folks, although we love the police, we're big back the blue, we can do things for you that the police can't do. Right. If you've got police on campus, great good for you to step in the right direction if you've got dedicated school resource officers awesome, But this tip and threat notification, it's being used. Like there's been several school shootings we've been able to stop because of tips and threats.
There have been several incidents of people reporting, hey, I heard somebody say that they're going to hurt themselves. And we've been able to, through the application, intervene and potentially help save somebody's life. So yeah, there's a lot of ways to use this tool and it's becoming very beneficial to all who use it.
Awesome. All right. So if you're listening, you can check out saferwatchapp.com. I know there's the request a demo button there. Make sure that you tell them that you heard about Safer Watch from the podcast. Sam, thank you so much. And Alan, thank you for hanging out with us. And thank you for all that you do with school safety as well.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alan. Thank you for your business. Let us know if we could do anything else to help you at any time.
Yes, sir. Thank you.
All right. Thanks. Thanks, Chris. Nice to meet you.
The views and opinions expressed on 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 and information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.