School Security Solutions
School Access Manager
School Access Manager (SAM) is a suite of products. It prevents/reduces swatting, shooting threats, bomb threats, Apple AirDrop threats, social media threats, notes left in school, verbal threats, email threats, bullying, and harassment using advanced technology and innovation to ensure your school's safety and security.
Currently, AirDrop messages can’t be tracked. Even Apple cannot look at a message and determine who sent the message. AirDrop does not have an audit log, and the user information is encrypted.
This has created the ability to send anonymous messages in AirDrop. Some students have taken advantage of the messages being anonymous and sent threats using AirDrop. More recently, schools have had evacuations and lockdowns as a result of these anonymous AirDrop threats. This has led to lost instructional time, which impacts a student’s progress, increases emotional stress, and costs taxpayers money. Airlines are starting to experience the same AirDrop threat issues.
Solution
Installed network devices that capture airdrop information. Create an audit log and decrypt limited user information to identify the sender. The network devices must be installed before a message is sent to capture the message and create an audit log.
Simple User Interface
Photos are presented like a photo contact sheet; next to each photo, expose the phone number of the device that sent the photo.
We capture the email of the device that sent the message but do not decrypt the email. If validation in addition to the phone number of the device is required, allow an administrator to enter the email address associated with the device. The system will compare the email entered with the captured email and indicate if it matches.
Network Devices
Airdrop uses both Bluetooth and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi to communicate between devices.
The application runs on a standard Linux device, making the hardware affordable.
This also allows the users to use off-the-shelf features like POE (power over ethernet) and other standard hardware features. This makes the complete solution affordable.
Other Use Cases
In addition to preventing school threats, there are other use cases:
- AirDrop Threats
- Securing Test Environments
- Electronic Harassment
- Electronic Bulling
- Airline AirDrop Security
- Theft of data
- AirDrop and its logos are trademarks of Apple Inc.
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.
SAM Voice has been updated to protect 911 centers from swatting and other school threats that are called into 911 centers.