Preventing School Threats
Types of threats we address in schools:
History
Our first product is called SAM. It first hit the market in 2017. We worked with state police, FBI, local PD, and school officials to develop it. Senator Chuck Schumer funded our first project by providing funding to a school to obtain our SAM product. At that time, no one could figure out how to stop the swatting calls. We did.
2022 was a Turning Point
In 2022 things changed with the Uvalde shootings. The number of threats has risen dramatically. In addition, we now have quite a few terror/criminal organizations that make threats as a service. They charge $50-$75 per threat and offer discounts for return customers and volume. BTW: in 2017, our first customer was the target of an overseas group that charged $25, per school threat. The number of these groups has grown dramatically (google Torswats, as one example). Today state-sponsored groups are believed to be in the game as well. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, they sent bomb threats to 1,000 schools in Ukraine. The technique is called the “hybrid war” ¹.
Before we tracked all this data for our internal use to make our products better, in the last two years, we realized the public is more aware of the swatting problem, and when we would tell them how much a swatting or school threat event costs, they were very surprised. In the last year, we became more focused on researching and collecting information on as many school threats as we could. Recently we started to provide the data to the press, and it has resulted in a great deal of positive attention.
SAM (School Access Manager)
Our SAM product uses pattern recognition to identify good and bad calls. We understand the patterns associated with school swatting calls.
BTW: Our database has identified 1.5 million bad calls, resulting in thousands of patterns.
Other School Threats
Over time we started looking at more than just threats that were called in. We realized if we could prevent other threats, our solution would protect more students. The other threats we were seeing were email threats, social media threats, and notes left in schools (mostly in bathrooms). We looked at several technologies for the social media solution but found that the main solution was to track keywords on social media posts. Social media companies became concerned that if they let law enforcement monitor all keywords on their platform and if young users found out, they would stop using the platform. As a result, social media companies stopped sharing that data without the user giving written permission. As you can imagine, no teenager or adult is going to agree to let you monitor them. The products that were in the market that did keyword searches started to lose customers because of social media companies cutting them off.
Addressing the notes left in school was a different problem. Most solutions today put cameras outside of the bathrooms, and if a note is left in a restroom, the school goes through the videos to determine who was in the restroom before the note was discovered.
School Threat Prevention Program
School Posters - We came up with a different, proactive prevention approach. We studied thousands of school threats and determined that most were viewed as harmless pranks. Even though we had a solution to prevent swatting, most adults and students still viewed most school threats as pranks. Our approach was to develop a database that could put a value on the threat. We felt if we could show the cost of a threat, it would start to change the perception from a prank to something more serious. We met with just under 50 school business officials and explained our methodology. By the time we were done, we had a formula that was acceptable. It took a great deal of work because every state has different requirements for the number of days and the number of hours. It took us over a year to collect all of that. Then we had to collect all the school budgets to apply our formula. That is a huge ongoing task.
Apple Airdrop Threat Prevention
A few years ago, a wave of school threats began using Apple AirDrop to send anonymous threatening messages. The typical event is a student sends a picture of a gun while they are in the lunchroom to everyone saying, “I am going to shoot up the school at x time today.
Unfortunately, even Apple does not have a way to track who sent an airdrop message. Students discovered the messages were not traceable, and for a time AirDrop threats were a fast-growing problem. Now airlines are having a problem with people sending Airdrop threats on planes. The airlines have started to chat with us about solving this.
We developed an AirDrop product that keeps a log of who sent an airdrop message and the picture they sent. Our software allows a school or an airline to identify the sender of an airdrop message in a matter of seconds. AirDrop-based threats are far less common today than they were then — but when they emerged, we built the technology to stop them, and that capability remains part of our suite.
911 Centers - Threat Prevention Program
We have started helping 911 centers make it harder for fake threat calls to get through — whether they come from overseas actors or from the domestic swatting networks now driving these threats, which increasingly place hoax calls directly into 911 centers. Our technology helps intercept these calls before they trigger a dangerous, armed response.
Plus, we are working on other products that will address upcoming threats that haven’t become mainstream yet.
The People Behind the Threats
The people making these threats are overwhelmingly young. In early 2025 the FBI adopted a term for the trend — “nihilistic violent extremism” — describing people who break the law out of a hatred of society itself and a desire to sow “indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” Much of it is organized inside a loose, Discord- and Telegram-based underground the FBI and researchers call “The Com,” home to groups such as Kitty Mafia, 764, Purgatory, and the Order of Nine Angles (O9A). Independent analysts put the majority of members between the ages of 11 and 25, with most leaders under 25 — many under 18.1, 2
For these networks, swatting is both a business and a rite of passage. Some sell it as a service — one 764 offshoot advertised swatting for as little as $20, claimed to have raised over $100,000, targeted more than 40 universities, and livestreamed the attacks. In one online group of roughly 1,100 school-age members, proving you’d made 200 swatting calls was a requirement to join. Others use the threat of swatting to groom, blackmail, and extort minors — which is why the FBI has issued repeated public warnings about 764 and now has hundreds of open investigations tied to the network.3 What gets dismissed as a “prank” is, for these groups, a tool of terror.
“It was the worst stuff I’ve ever looked at in six years of working CSAM.”
— Captain Jeremy Lanier, Stephenville Police Department, on the 764 network (via WIRED)
The Human Cost: What This Does to Students
Behind every threat is a building full of children. A single hoax empties classrooms, sends kids running or hiding, and leaves them frightened long after the “all clear.” The damage is cumulative: in the hardest-hit schools, students face threat after threat, and the anxiety, lost sleep, and lost learning compound — showing up in absenteeism, in test scores, and in a growing unease about simply going to school. Two of the largest costs are also the least reported. The first is lost instructional time — every lockdown, evacuation, and disrupted day strips hours of learning from students; putting a defensible dollar figure on that loss is exactly what the methodology in our founder’s published research was built to do (below). The second is the mental-health toll, which our analysis of the 2024–25 school year finds is the single biggest driver of what a threat costs. Most coverage counts neither — it stops at the visible police response and never tallies the lost instructional time or the mental-health cost at all. Measured honestly, that human cost dwarfs the rest. Students, parents, and staff should not have to be terrorized to learn that a “prank” was never harmless. Protecting a child’s ability to feel safe at school is, in the end, the whole point.
The Hybrid War Comes Home
At the most sophisticated end, this is a tool of nation-states. Using bomb threats and swatting to spread fear — instead of troops — is a recognized tactic of terror; it is why Russia sent threats to roughly 1,000 Ukrainian schools before it invaded, and why Russia is suspected in waves of bomb threats against schoolchildren across Europe. Investigators have documented something more chilling still: reporting by the Financial Times and warnings from Europol describe Russian services grooming vulnerable teenagers online — through gaming platforms, Telegram, and social media — and paying them to carry out sabotage and attacks on Russia’s enemies. Europol now calls the recruitment of minors one of the fastest-growing security threats in Europe. It is psychological warfare, run by professionals, aimed at kids.4
What began as a military tactic has found its way into our own local and national political landscape. More and more, individuals and organizations are abandoning debate and the other tools of a democracy to settle disagreements, reaching instead for intimidation and terror to force change. The same swatting playbook now targets elected officials at their homes, corporations a group disagrees with, and even polling and voting locations — on Election Day 2024, the FBI confirmed bomb threats to dozens of polling places across several states, many traced to overseas email domains. It reaches critical infrastructure, too: in March 2026, a group calling itself Kitty Mafia was suspected in a swatting bomb threat that shut down part of Kansas City International Airport for two hours.5Same tactic. Same tools. A different target.
This Is Why We Start in Schools
Swatting is a learned behavior. If we address it early — while it is still treated as a school prank — we can take it out of the toolkit before it becomes a weapon used to intimidate, suppress, or terrorize an individual, a business, an election, or a community. The technology, the consequences, and the education that stop a threat in a high school are the same things that keep it from ever reaching a ballot box or a boardroom. Prevention in schools is prevention everywhere.
Sources: 1 Just Security — Swatting Attacks and Nihilistic Violent Extremism: A Primer (2025). 2 WIRED — Inside 764 and The Com. 3 ABC News — FBI investigations into the “764” network. 4 France 24 / Financial Times — Russian recruitment of teenagers. 5 KMBC — “Kitty Mafia” suspected in KCI airport bomb threat. Additional research: CEMIR — Trans-National Threat Actors.