Evan and Brad are joined by Mike Dronen. The three of them chat about school cybersecurity threats within K-12 that pose a problem for their CIOs, and some tips administrators, educators, and parents can use to keep student and staff data safe.
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Podcast Transcription:
[00:00:22] Evan Francen: welcome back. This is episode 58 of the Unsecurity podcast and I’m your host this week. Evan Francen. Today is December 16 and joining me is my co host Brad Nigh. Good morning Brad.
[00:00:33] Brad Nigh: Good morning. I’m awake.
[00:00:35] Evan Francen: I know I am too. Uh we’re gonna get to going to get to that in a minute. We’ve had a couple great shows the past couple of weeks. We learned a lot a lot from our guest Justin Webb. Today. Justin is not with us. Two days to weeks I think is the most we can handle or he could handle. No, I think it’s me man. Uh you know when you’re talking about a lawyer and all that stuff, two weeks is good. We did talk a ton about privacy things, some legal things. Uh, this week we’re going to shift gears And talk about information security in K through 12. uh, that’s schools case. You don’t know what K through 12 is to help us navigate these waters. I’ve invited the Executive Director of Technology from Minnetonka Public Schools to our show. Minnetonka happens to be my alma mater. There’s a long history there. I’m surprised they still talk to me but here we are. But that person is mike drawn in and he’s also a good friend. Welcome Mike
[00:01:33] Mike Dronen: Gentlemen, Thanks for having me on the podcast. Really, really honored to be a part of the conversation.
[00:01:39] Evan Francen: We are too. It’s gonna be, yeah, it’s gonna be great to get your perspective on a bunch of things. Uh we’re excited to have you on the show for a number of reasons. You’re absolutely a good guy, I’m a skipper and brad. We were just talking before the show got started, brad has a couple of kids in the district. Um so I’m sure he’d like to hear some things too and just, you know, we’ve got some some personal connections as well uh and thank you for joining, especially on short notice before we dive into the meat of the show. Uh I always like to check in just kind of see how people are doing, see you know where you’re at. So mike, how are you doing? How was your week? And what do you expect this week,
[00:02:19] Mike Dronen: had a good week last week, you know, I never once in a while, I have these crazy moments where I look at six days and I got like seven or eight presentations lined up and that was just last week and that’s awesome. I had an opportunity to uh the newsletter article for our state superintendents, which was just fun to do and then I’ve got a conversation with the school board this coming thursday on kind of history of technology and our hopes and expectations for the future and had to have that submitted on friday and that was really fun too, Go through that process and really looking forward to the conversation and then the weekend on saturday was a whirlwind. I had an opportunity to spend a little bit of time with some of the folks from Kazan, which is the association concert association or something. How do you say that C word
[00:03:09] Evan Francen: consortium,
[00:03:11] Mike Dronen: awesome.
[00:03:12] Brad Nigh: Thanks. It’s early
[00:03:14] Evan Francen: for this.
[00:03:15] Mike Dronen: It’s really, really um, for school networking and we had a rumor probably, I’d say 35 maybe 40 technology coordinators, technology directors, C T. O. S column, but you will from out of state as well as around the metro area and had a really awesome set of conversations in the morning and the afternoon about, You know, what is, what is leadership in K-12 specific detect specific attack look like these days. And where do we think it’s headed in 55 years from now. So, uh, fun field from field last week and looking forward to this upcoming week. And uh, kind of our last week with our, with our students in school before they take off for the winter break,
[00:03:55] Brad Nigh: wow. Are you sure you can’t keep my kids for at that time? I’m not looking kidding, I’m kidding. Well,
[00:04:02] Evan Francen: how about you brad? How was your week?
[00:04:04] Brad Nigh: It was good. It’s been just, you know, a whirlwind. The uh, it
[00:04:08] Evan Francen: is an incident response come in last week.
[00:04:10] Brad Nigh: Didn’t we did another one. Um, what’s new? Yeah, I know, finishing up a couple doing some forensic imaging and just, you know, collecting the evidence and we’re pretty much done. It’s just take so long to just image drives, click, click, wait, yep. So just running that stuff. Yeah, just end of the year wrap up of everybody freaking out that they haven’t gotten their stuff on the books yet to do and you know, you know how it
[00:04:41] Evan Francen: is, We promised we’d get this thing done. Oh crap, we have budget left,
[00:04:44] Brad Nigh: Yeah, or yeah, we, we need to have a pin test done well, we can’t do it till january, can we at least buy it so you can send a letter that we’ve, yes,
[00:04:56] Evan Francen: yes, we’ll take your
[00:04:57] Brad Nigh: money.
[00:04:58] Evan Francen: Right.
[00:04:59] Brad Nigh: But yeah, no, it’s good. Just just chaotic, but probably not as, yeah, I want to say. I think from an analyst perspective, it hasn’t been as bad as previous
[00:05:09] Evan Francen: years. You guys did a great job planning this
[00:05:11] Brad Nigh: year. Really tried. I know it’s still chaotic, but uh, yeah, there’s just other parts of it that are not selling down. Sure, But hopefully, yeah, hopefully the analyst felt a little bit better this year, try not to
[00:05:25] Evan Francen: well up until this year we had, we had so much work in the fourth quarter and we did and it was so hard to plan for it operationally that many times. We were telling analysts no vacations for the holidays, which was just a crappy thing to do, but that was just the way the business was this year, you guys did a much better job planning operationally so that people could take vacations. So
[00:05:50] Brad Nigh: it’s good. Yeah, we
[00:05:51] Evan Francen: Were in numbers and I mean vacation like 15 minutes
[00:05:55] Brad Nigh: you get a day
[00:05:56] Evan Francen: a day,
[00:05:58] Brad Nigh: the quarter you get a day. No, no,
[00:06:01] Mike Dronen: not at all,
[00:06:02] Brad Nigh: no, but good overall. Just, you know, I’m definitely looking forward to typically like that christmas day, New Year’s clients don’t want to talk to us. So I am looking forward to being able to catch my breath a little bit here over the next couple weeks, make it through
[00:06:18] Evan Francen: this week. We ended the security studio roadshow last week with Dallas on friday yet last week was just crazy. Uh you know, um I had an executive leadership team meeting that took all day, that was Wednesday, I had a board of directors meeting on thursday
[00:06:37] Brad Nigh: that was cool.
[00:06:37] Evan Francen: Yeah, roger grimes was here and Pat Joyce and bunch of people but I just felt beat up, you know, because the results aren’t, you know, business results aren’t as good as what you plan and so it’s a, it’s a question of whether or not you said expectations incorrectly or whatever and I, and I think it’s mostly that uh, but it was, you know, on the hot seat for a good four hours and then trip to Dallas kind of cold uh sneezing, I mean and you probably still hear it, but this week is a little slower. So I’m excited about that. Very
[00:07:15] Brad Nigh: good. Yeah. You guys not traveling again until january,
[00:07:20] Evan Francen: right? I’m not traveling again until I take vacation, which would be january
[00:07:24] Brad Nigh: for the roadshow. It’s yeah, you’re done. You’re the holidays. That’s good.
[00:07:28] Evan Francen: Yeah. Metal baton of great people. I think eventually I’ll just write a post on all the cool people I met because I met a bunch more cool people last week in Dallas pecan Lodge. Did some more barbecue down there, shout out. Yeah. It was awesome. So jealous. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let’s get back to to uh the, I guess the matter at hand, so many talk of public schools, if you don’t know who Minnetonka is, it’s M I N N E T O N K. A. The skipper’s home of the skipper’s probably the best school ever. I’m just saying
[00:08:03] Mike Dronen: no, that’s right. That’s definitely best school over. You got that right?
[00:08:06] Evan Francen: See it’s been you have kids there. Now you have to go with this pride. Right? It’s a big school district though. To 10,900 students in grades K through 12, 6 elementary schools to middle schools In one high school. Uh Yeah. Yeah. It’s a big school district. Not not one of the ones that the second largest school district in the state of Minnesota mike.
[00:08:33] Mike Dronen: I think we’re like, I want to say we’re like fourth or fifth. You know, we’ve got, you got, you got Anoka Saint paul and Minneapolis. Those are really big. Rosemont, Rosemont, Apple Valley egan pretty big. So we’re sitting around 5, 6, 7 somewhere somewhere in that spot. Yeah. Okay.
[00:08:51] Evan Francen: And for all the listeners who are from china or wiser to or Eden prairie, no need to listen anymore because we’re going to bash, you know, I’m just kidding. We’re not going there. I’m not going there. Just kidding. But we, those are big rivals. When I was in high school. Every time we played the hornets, you know, from a dina, you know? Yeah, big rivalries. All right. So anyway, we’ve got some, some things to talk about with information security and K through 12. The first thing to start off with is, I came across this article and it was, it’s uh, it comes from Ed Tech. It’s Ed Tech magazine and the title of the article is The cybersecurity threats that keep K through 12 ceos up at night now in Minnetonka School district mike, you would be, you’d be the C. I. O. That’s not your official job title, but that’s essentially what you are. Is that right?
[00:09:46] Mike Dronen: Yep, that’s true. That’s going to be true for a lot of districts are side sizing and not have a C. I. O, but their Ceo or executive Director Director of tech. That information piece is going to land underneath them at, at, on a variety of different levels. So
[00:10:02] Evan Francen: okay and you’ve been, how long have you been in K through 12? You’ve been in K through 12 for a long time.
[00:10:09] Mike Dronen: Yeah it’s interesting. So this marks years seven in Minnetonka. Prior to that seven years in Stillwater doing the same thing obviously different districts. And then prior to that 13 years with the Minneapolis public schools. So my kind of my career in terms of K 12, it started in the classroom is a middle school science teacher in Minneapolis and I just saw the power of technology to engage kids and understand complex scientific um concepts and things like that. And one thing led to another and eventually I got invited over to the dark side or the administrative side if you will. And I got invited in there because our articulate at the time This is back like 96 97 every year she did a large technology survey. And of course there anything was on paper back then And I was dabbling with databases and making web browsers connect to them and it was it wasn’t out there out there but for K-12 it was way out there and I was looking at some ways to make that work. Hey I you know I said Colleen I can we can put this on the on the web and everybody can do it online and she said no way. And I said sure here’s a proof of concept. I showed it to her and cross my fingers that would work and it did. And one thing led to another and she said, hey, come back to work on the team. And I said, no, I love kids and teachers. And what she told me is true today is what back then. And it’s look at, look at your gifts, look at your skills and look at how you can impact the organization for the best. And she said, if you, if you work out of our department, think of all the teachers you can influence and then the kids one and so forth. So it’s kind of my trajectory, you know, through, through K 12, so large, urban, um, super diverse, awesome district to, you know, a border town district over there in still water and then over here on the west side in Minnetonka.
[00:12:04] Evan Francen: That’s really cool. Yeah, because I suppose before, I mean you’re, you’re sort of the beginning of this because what did school schools didn’t really have see IOS back in, Back in the 90s and early two thousands.
[00:12:17] Mike Dronen: They didn’t, in fact, there were days when, you know, the conversations we had where, hey, you guys think we should get a fire well And kato was like, I don’t think we need one. We need one. And we couldn’t come up with reasons why we would even need a firewall on our public, on a public network. So those are the, those are the earliest days of it, you know? Um, and then when we found security, it was uh, UNIX analytics guy down in the basement who was just, he was basically just building accounts and you know, wanting to make sure that he had consistent naming conventions and all of that. So Yeah. 12 and still part of a challenge today. I know if or when we talk about challenges here later in our conversation, one is just going to be the framework that a lot of Really solid good people in K-12 bring into it, which is kind of the Minnesota framework of everybody’s nice. Nobody’s going to hurt me. And as we know, that’s, that’s not the case. Right? So
[00:13:15] Evan Francen: yeah, in a little segue here, did you hear about Laconia school district last week? The threat when they locked down and all that stuff.
[00:13:25] Mike Dronen: Yeah. So I mean this is a, this is a good example where I wasn’t it a parent who Heard It 1st. Is that, is that right?
[00:13:33] Evan Francen: Yeah. I have one child left in school still and she’s, she goes to a cockney high school. Yeah. And I guess there was a social media post with a kid who had, you know, made a threat and had a gun in the video that he had posted on social media and he had been expelled I think just a few days prior or something like that. But apparently reported this and then can I, wow, I mean everything went crazy because all the rumors spread so fast.
[00:14:04] Mike Dronen: Yeah. Well, you know, rumor controls hard, right? But if you look at okay, parent hears it, they do the right thing. They report it right away. School district has some level of an incident response plan for things like this. Um, executes on it and in, in their model, you know, it meant closing school, which, which is a good decision from what I understand of what they needed to do. But you know, you know when people ask us about, you know what mike, what’s your, you know, what are some of the security things you guys do around the physical part of security protecting kids? You know, not just not just your information but protecting kids. We almost to a t will say the very first thing we do is we really work hard at building strong community amongst our students and amongst our families because we believe that we’ve got a strong community and a student has a need at some level, whether it’s um personal need or some other type of need. The community can support them. This community can advocate and find help for them. Um, so I think a lot of times that can be overlooked. So here’s a case where kony has a strong enough community that the parents are, Hey, I see this. I want to report it. The administration is nimble and quick and can respond right away. Um, that whole community peace and working towards that. I mean schools should be doing it otherwise, but it’s a great asset.
[00:15:31] Evan Francen: Yeah. I was very impressed with their response. And even because they did, they did their response. And then my daughter who’s pretty active in social media and comes home and says, well they found a gun and all these other things. I’m like, well that’s not what the authorities have reported. And you’ve got to think about where you’re getting your information from and says, no, it’s true. It’s true. And I’m like, well, I don’t think it is, you know, and then the school or the sheriff’s department, Carver County Sheriff’s department, which is where Laconia is issued a, sent an email to everybody through the school district yesterday saying essentially stop with the rumors. I mean it was pretty blunt was that, I know, I,
[00:16:18] Mike Dronen: I like that. And I’ve worked with, I’ve worked with Carver a couple times before just on technical pieces when they got, generally, if they’ve got an ipad and they’re having a couple challenges, um, getting into it are doing what they need to on it. They’ll, they’ll stop by because we, we do that every day. Right? So, um, every interaction we’ve had with the, with law enforcement Carver top notch, really, really good.
[00:16:41] Evan Francen: Yeah, I thought so too. And then they listed out like these are the facts, you know, and I emphasize the facts. No gun was found there, you know, there was no gun on any school property. And I just thought, wow, I really like how they gave clarity cause then I could go to my daughter who’s been hearing all these things through social media and say, Honey, this is the facts and she says, well they don’t know like why would they certainly do know and why would they have any, uh, motivation to lie to you? These are the authorities, right? Yeah. It was interesting was going back to school today, this thing happened on friday.
[00:17:17] Brad Nigh: I will say I had, uh, there was an incident at one of my kids schools earlier this year from a, from a physical perspective in, in the communication from the principal was, yeah, top notch and then, yeah, some of the follow up of, you know, here, here’s, here’s the facts. Here’s what we do. And then a couple days later here’s a follow up of kind of a lessons learned and what they’ll change moving forward. So I was really impressed with, you know, the plane was in place. They took action, executed it and then all right, Here’s what we’ve identified. We’re going to change and improve on next
[00:17:51] Evan Francen: time. Right? So kudos to Minnetonka school district on that one.
[00:17:54] Mike Dronen: That’s good to hear.
[00:17:56] Evan Francen: All right. So anyway, this, this article threats that keep see IOS up at night. Um, it was actually one of the quotes in the article here is, you know, from Ryan cloudier who we were just talking about prior to so
[00:18:11] Brad Nigh: getting it on the show a couple times. Yeah, but without,
[00:18:13] Evan Francen: you know, without me. Yeah. And then also you ran into Ryan on saturday. Right?
[00:18:19] Mike Dronen: Mike. Yeah. Yeah. We were at a little uh little conference um, at the Hyatt regency in downtown Minneapolis, some folks will know about that
[00:18:28] Evan Francen: hotel. Well, in this article, it starts off with, you know, schools are not safe from cyber security threats. That’s the first, you know, sort of statement here. And then it goes on, consider this 712 publicly disclosed cyber security-related incidents involving US public schools since 2016. And then I guess there’s a map and the important thing that there is publicly disclosed, I know of at least a couple of school districts who never ever reported that probably should have reported.
[00:18:59] Brad Nigh: Well, but if you look at the purple, uh, there’s no requirement for reporting.
[00:19:05] Evan Francen: Oh yeah. Well, regular regulations. Right? So schools is,
[00:19:08] Brad Nigh: that’s why there, who wants to report
[00:19:11] Evan Francen: it. Right.
[00:19:13] Mike Dronen: 100 yeah. Minutes. Minnesota’s got a data practices act in legislation. Um, we kind of call it chapter 13 has nothing to do with finances, but there’s a, there’s some disclosure information in there. Um, so, I mean schools are under a certain level, but again every incidents different. Right? So there was one, so one that made it, if you look at the map, which is interesting. Um, there was one district cited in Minnesota and um, this was, this was an issue with a third party vendor who had mis configured something on Aws for at least three or four days was probably longer and information may have been exposed and it affected aspect a number of districts around us. We chose to disclose it. Hey, parents, here’s what happened here is the information from the vendor, here’s, you know, that it handled well, a couple parent questions that was about it. But I was surprised how many districts did not report that anywhere. So there’s, you know, sometimes there’s different gray areas, right? Depending on what’s going on, but not always so that, you know, those numbers and I have not to interrupt, but you’re probably gonna say this are brad that, you know, these are just the public ones that we see out there and for sure there’s, there’s definitely more.
[00:20:30] Evan Francen: Yeah, I know of at least a couple that aren’t on this map
[00:20:35] Brad Nigh: that I,
[00:20:37] Evan Francen: that I was involved in the incident response.
[00:20:40] Brad Nigh: I’m looking this up now because uh, do one of the only keep a couple of VC. So clients and one of mine is a K through 12. I’m wondering if it shows up. Yeah, well that was the
[00:20:56] Evan Francen: same until you rely on the, the authorities, you know, at the school district that itself to report it and if they choose not to, you know, from our perspective when we’re an incident responder doing the incident response, we’re obligated by our agreement with the school that we don’t disclose it. So they sort of, we consult them too if they decide not to a lot of times, no
[00:21:24] Brad Nigh: recourse really right. It goes to legal to, right. So their lawyers are going to inform them and make that recommendation based on the information available.
[00:21:38] Evan Francen: So mike, what, what’s one of the, you know, are there any types of attacks, any types of things from an information security perspective to keep you up at night?
[00:21:48] Mike Dronen: You know, the, so, um, you know, I feel really blessed. I’ve got a really strong technical team. Um, one of the challenges of K- 12 is to have a strong technical team and that’s, that’s really true. Whether you’re small company smb your large corporate tooth, that’s gonna be true anywhere, but that, that helps me to sleep a little bit better at night. The things that are kind of outliers for us in K 12 and the one that’s really unique to K 12 versus uh, snb corporate America. Other government sectors is we have uh, air quotes here, employee type called student and we can’t really fire them and we don’t want to fire them if they make some not great decisions because they’re curious about how does this work or, you know, what if I do this type of thing. So we need, we need to have strategies and things in place to help students understand, you know, here are the rules of the road and why it’s more valuable to stay on the road than to get stuck in the ditch. And so, So that’s, that’s a little bit unique to K-12 and sometimes that can keep me up at night. How are kids doing? Are they, are they still messing around with this that or the other thing or have they realized, let’s not, let’s not try to do that anymore. That’s probably the one largest category I’d say. Okay.
[00:23:07] Evan Francen: When some of the things in the article talks about, you know, successful phishing attacks, how ransom where, because everybody’s not everybody, but everybody’s a target, certainly for ransom where, uh, and the phishing attacks, you know, sort of, uh, in this article, it’s the business email compromise type of attack where we can over the attacker, you know, convinces the school to make payments somewhere else. Uh, and then scam out of potentially millions.
[00:23:37] Brad Nigh: I know multiple stories of teachers that bought gift cards and did it when submitted for reimbursement and like no, And we’re talking like Hundreds or a couple $1,000.
[00:23:50] Evan Francen: So what the teacher got an email purported to be from the superintendent
[00:23:55] Brad Nigh: or from, yeah, from a principal or somebody up and said, Hey, you know, can you do this?
[00:24:01] Mike Dronen: Yeah. So we’ll see. We’ll see those. Yeah. You guys see him. Right. So kind of the name spoofing thing. Um, yeah, I did. So I think, I don’t know Evan, so Evan uh, dropped in and spend some time with our principals and administrators this summer and um, heaven, I don’t think I did it while you were there, but I had, so I chose to actually respond to one of these, Somebody said to me and I pretended I was them and I went back and forth. I was curious to see how far would the conversation go And anyways they were um, they said, hey, you know, um, I said, where are you located there? Like we’re in France and so I made up some story about, you know, one of our people in the office traveling to France and they’ll bring your gift cards over and it was, it was hilarious the way the conversation went and then eventually I guess google probably shut down the account that they were using or something or I was too annoying and never never heard back from him again. But um, yeah, so the name spoofing. So we’ll see that you will also see a lot of the, hey, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got a new bank now can you move my paycheck over here? You know, that’s pretty typical. Again, these are, you know, not a lot of creativity at this level. Uh, on the bad actor side these days and then the last one, which will see, we will see it pretty quick. It will be a little bit until it comes out, but it’s going to be the, You know, the targeted spear fishing again? Hey, can I get, you know, basically W2 information so I can sell the list or file for false tax returns. So we’ll see those. So you think about all those right, that all kind of lands on the how do we train our users, how do we support our users to recognize recognize some of this? Um So we’ll see it on the ransom. Where thank you guys want to talk about that for a minute
[00:25:42] Evan Francen: or? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We’re sort of going where you’re taking us here.
[00:25:48] Mike Dronen: Okay. All right. So so we get the questions. So we did um we did one of these uh see ellie continuing education for attorney things here a month or two ago? Yeah. And um great, great, great group of folks fun to do it. And we didn’t we didn’t quite do tabletops, but we did three or four scenarios. And you know, what would you do? How would you prevent a type of thing? And so ransomware came up? So you know what we talked about there was, you know, nail down the fundamentals in your organization? Right. So do you have good inventory control? Um do you have good regular backups and you have them separated off network? Are you keeping up with all your software patches and updates um are you practicing? You know, privilege lease privilege. Right. So if you don’t need an admin account or something that can install you know are you doing that? Um Who’s got remote desktop access some of some of those basic so we said you got to hit all those fundamentals first and then there’s then there’s some other things that you can do on top of it. So I can’t I’m hard pressed you guys no more because you see more I. R. S. And then I hear about or definitely see um I mean how many times do you see ransom where happening when people had really all the best practices rolling. And the only reason they got ransomed was because of some really way out there piece of code that nobody is really kind of seen yet. You know what I’m asking or
[00:27:13] Evan Francen: saying? Yeah it’s very very rare you know and the containment is very easy. Um Well if you’re following best practices though I’ve never seen a ransom been paid. You know because they’ve got air gap backups and they’re able to restore and usually they’re able to restore within a few hours if you’re doing it. Well
[00:27:33] Brad Nigh: yeah I’m trying to think usually there’s pretty big gaps when they have this happen but we definitely had customers who had we were able to recover from backups but they had some I can’t think of anyone who was you know locked down Pretty good. That has had this happen. It’s always like well how did they get in? Yes
[00:27:55] Evan Francen: single factor
[00:27:55] Brad Nigh: authentication with E. P. Right on which was which hole? Who knows? So.
[00:28:03] Mike Dronen: Right right right. Yeah. The closest.
[00:28:07] Evan Francen: No you’re exactly right if you follow and that’s where the magic is. Right. The magic is in the basics. It’s in the foundation of a security program. If you can understand the foundational components of security and master those. I mean that you’re 90% of the way there.
[00:28:24] Mike Dronen: So if you were so this is the like if I could say just one thing to my colleagues in K. 12 about you know how to better protect. Um I’m gonna I’m not gonna I’m not gonna start with the basics I’m gonna have that as number two. Number one. I’m going to say do some kind of risk assessment because what they’ll find in the risk assessment as item number one is hey do you have these you know these top 10 15 whatever they are basics covered. Okay I do great. Um The problem is if you go, hey let’s just work on the basics and be really good on those. You never really get a comprehensive view of you know what are all the risks that we have out there. Right? So like our story like when I came to Minnetonka seven years ago I think year number two that so six years ago um I hollered down the street at fr and I think I was talking to steve at the time and said, hey, can you guys do like basic, you know, external kind of vulnerability scan for us? Sure, no problem, love to do it. And and then he said, hey can we do some internal work? And I said, oh you should see my list. It’s like we don’t need you guys now, we know what we got to do. So we mowed down as much of that as we can and then we re engage with you guys a year or so ago and said, hey, come on on the inside now and hit us hard, don’t hold anything back. And my team when we were deciding kind of what kind of a company to work with. There are a variety of companies that offer really broad portfolio and security happens to be one item in it. And I told my team, I said, you know, let’s let’s just work with a company that just does security Because they’re gonna they’re gonna like have it, they’re going to know what to do. And I said, and I don’t want to work with a company that just does K-12 security, I want to like stack up against like everybody else. And I see where it goes. And so for us, that was really great because I think we looked at, I don’t know, 56, or more different controls a day and a half process to do it. And so we’ve got our list of stuff, so it’s like, OK, we’ve got marching orders. So it was, that’s my piece of advice.
[00:30:26] Evan Francen: Well, and that’s wise advice. I mean, if you were to hire me uh you know, because we’ve been brad and I see, so or VC so at probably a few 100 organizations now and that’s where you have to start right, You have to, you have to start with the risk assessment so that it’s a diagnosis, you know, where do I go from here? Where do I spend that next information security dollar? Where is it going to be the most impactful?
[00:30:52] Brad Nigh: And I think a lot of times it’s eye opening to like I was gonna ask, were there, so you’ve done a lot of work, were there any big surprises? Like you’re like, oh, jeez, I didn’t even think of that, or
[00:31:03] Mike Dronen: So there was one. and that was, we don’t we don’t we don’t write down a lot of documentation like, okay, if I’m going to make a change on the firewall, I’m gonna put it, I’m gonna write it somewhere, we just, we just do it because I got a great team and they know what they’re doing and all that, or, you know, we don’t have a written policy that talks about removable media. Well, we kind of thought we’ve never really needed one from an operational side, you can argue it both ways, but as we dove into the need to have written procedure and policy. Um Yes to some extent it’s to help employees know the rules of the road but to the other extent it’s to help potential litigating situations. I know that you know we’ve documented this is how we want the employee to behave or you know um and these are how we want our department tech folks to behave and how they want to do stuff. So so that was a big piece. So I’m I’m just having a lot of fun these days right? You
[00:32:03] Brad Nigh: know that’s a place it’s a good kind of segment for something I wanted to mention is One of the biggest things that surprised me about K. through 12 is the hesitation to have a policy for information security policies. They’re always named something different because you know there’s public disclosure and the school board and all that stuff. Uh You know where how do you how do you approach that?
[00:32:30] Mike Dronen: Yeah. So like in in K. 12 when you use the word policy, what you mean is you mean a document that went in front of the school board? They vetted it, they voted on it. They gave it a thumbs up or thumbs down. And now it’s officially policy opposed to that we use the word called procedure which means you know here here’s how we’ll run the I. T. Department specific to network segmentation specific to adding new clients, selecting vendors vetting them and all that well So we use procedure around that. So we’re actually kind of kicking the idea around if the school board would be open to having a policy that talked about the procedures and it would almost be like the school board is approving that the procedures developed right now by the I. T. Department um are ones that they’ll they’ll follow until they need to be updated or something along those, something along those lines. But schools are generally pretty light on documenting some of the things that you might see in a in a medium sized or larger business. So
[00:33:32] Brad Nigh: It is I think that that is a unique challenge that that K. 12 has over versus any other industry that I’ve worked with.
[00:33:42] Evan Francen: Sure I have a list of questions here. One is you know how does information security work in K. 12? Like in in the private sector in business. You have this, you know you may have a board of directors, you have a Ceo and then sometimes the sea. So if you have a Chief information security officer, if it’s large enough may report directly to the Ceo but more commonly reports to the C. I. O. But that’s sort of the governance structure and then things kind of flow through there. How does it work in in K. through 12 for people that aren’t familiar.
[00:34:15] Mike Dronen: Yeah. So we can we can talk both about um out state metro where your school district’s gonna be a little bit smaller and what we’ll find there whether it’s the Minnesota’s got a Southwest Service Cooperative. They’ve got a central Minnesota cooperative, they’ve got an arrowhead region. So there’s a variety of these that um that they you could call it a lightweight sock maybe at some level, but they provide a lot of different services to their member districts. And so and they’re going to probably share bandwidth and I. S. P. They might share firewall, they might share storage, some things along those lines. So there you might find a district and you’ve got one person who does all of it. And so they can they can only they’re only going to know so much. They can only go so far. So they’ll tap other member districts around them. They’ll tap some of the folks at the service cooperative where there’s a little bit more expertise and that’s how most rural school districts will kind of manage that that information security peace as you move to districts that a little bit larger like ours. We’ve got, you know, my team which is 14 technical folks. And within that group we’ve got um a network team which is a smaller group, but that’s also our information security team if you will. And we’ve got three folks on there who know that these specific things are kind of their things within it and we meet regularly and we take out the risk document, we run through it. We talk about projects and things along those, those lines. We don’t have somebody who sits and looks at logs every day or every other day and we, we’ve got room to improve their, so that’s one of the things we’re trying to figure out. How do we want to do that because some of the things we catch or when we’re looking at log detail, um, you know, for example, hey, why does this person have three devices? Well, actually, actuality, that’s not what the log means. The log means that there credentials were used to log into three different devices. So let’s dig deeper and see what’s going on there. Right? So, and then when you get to larger ones like um really large school districts where you can have a dedicated C. I. O. Or you can have a security team. Um, you know, you can go a little bit a little bit further with those practices. And then the other big piece, at at least in Minnesota, we’re doing fairly well right now is we’ve got some great conversations amongst district technical leadership in terms of best practices. Um, what are you seeing, what’s working, how are you handling this? Um, you, you write currently today? So today you won’t, you won’t find a lot of school districts being a part of the multi state I sack, which K twelve’s can belong to. They might think that they can, but there’s not too many plugged into them. And that’s, that’s, They should be more 12, it’s okay that there’s not because I feel most of the information that my colleagues need right now needs to be a little bit closer to the ground, you know, just a few feet above the ground actually. So these regional meetings that we have and regional conversations that we have just brings a lot of value and what’s promising for me When I look back five years and I asked the question, where was Minnesota K-12 in terms of information security compared to today, I’m like super happy where we’re at today based on the growth. I’ve seen it in the five years. Got got a lot more work to do, don’t get me wrong, but if I, if I look back five years and didn’t see anything close to that, I would be just super disappointed and trying to figure out how do we wrap this thing up. But I feel K- 12 has been moving pretty strongly in the space. So I’m happy about that. We’ve got a little bit further to go.
[00:37:50] Evan Francen: Yeah, I think it’s just unique. I think it’s taking the time to understand, you know, the unique challenges in K through 12 because it’s not the same. Uh, it’s managed differently there. You know, you’ve got budgetary constraints that maybe are different and you’ve got so many different types of schools and you’ve talked about rules, rural schools, you know, larger schools like Minnetonka and then when you look at like across the United States, I mean Minnetonka is not even in the top two, largest school districts, so, and they’re all run different.
[00:38:25] Mike Dronen: Oh yeah. And then, you know, the other component a little bit unique to is so think about our district, 11,000 students. Right? So That’s 11,000 unique student accounts that were responsible for Connected to those are about about, I think we have around 1800 employees that get a paycheck from the district. So put those on top of there and then you’re adding in parents. Right? So you, so we’re, we manage almost 25,000 accounts. So identity management, um, super critical for us. So you think of all those different types, Right? I’m a parent of a kid that goes to this school in this school and I’m also an employee. Okay. So what does that login have to do, You know when the parent logs into this system or this system? So, um, you know, again, you’re talking about Unique things in K 12. Um, and then, and then with that, right, the parent education piece. So we’re, you know, parents who, who are new parents now have a different set of challenges just in terms of social media, where it is now versus where it was six or seven years ago or even more so an increasing responsibility, which, which we really welcome and enjoyment. Ataka is supporting our parents because we know how critical they are for a successful student experience, supporting them with information materials. Um, we just finished one showing of a uh, pretty good video. It’s called like L I K E and I think we’ve got another one queued up in january. And for me it’s probably the best balanced treatment of social media and adolescent development and parent role in helping their kids. So we, we really welcomed those types of conversations And so The stuff that, that folks can provide into the K-12 space to help and guide parents. Um, super important today, more so now than 10 years ago.
[00:40:16] Brad Nigh: So I volunteered with IC squared, they do the, I am cyber safe and
[00:40:21] Mike Dronen: do
[00:40:22] Brad Nigh: parent and teacher and student presentations and the parent ones are always, I love doing them. But yeah, the the deer in the headlights, the like as they have this realization that, you know, they, they don’t really understand and, and like the questions and that back and forth, they want to learn in no more and you know, there’s just not a lot out there to help them. Yeah.
[00:40:48] Mike Dronen: Yeah. Well that’s, that’s awesome. You’re doing that brad.
[00:40:51] Evan Francen: So the, uh, yeah, his parents, I’m just trying to relate to like this weekend, you know, the events of this weekend because what baffled me was when I was in school, uh, you know, which was, wasn’t that long ago. I’m not that old bread. You’re looking at me
[00:41:08] Brad Nigh: like I’m old. No, not at all.
[00:41:11] Evan Francen: But the rumors didn’t spread like this, you know, and this is a physical safety concern because I know some parents are keeping their kids out of school in Laconia school district this week because, well, because they’re believing the rumors, you know, that social media, the disinformation that can
[00:41:29] Brad Nigh: out on it and it spread so fast. Right? And by the time the truth of the facts come out, it’s hard to, Yeah,
[00:41:39] Mike Dronen: it is. Yeah. Is that research last year something that was like false information spread seven or eight times faster than true. Yeah,
[00:41:47] Evan Francen: it’s totally, it’s totally, it. So like at the in Minnetonka school district, who would be the same as the Ceo. Would that be the superintendent? I mean, if you want to kind of make that
[00:42:01] Mike Dronen: comparison, that would be, this be the superintendent then. Um, so depending on what, what was going on or what it was, you know, different, different folks get rolled into the team, but it would be the superintendent. So they’d be essentially the Ceo,
[00:42:14] Evan Francen: because I thought it was really neat when I, when I was talking to them and you know, you’re, you’re gathering, uh, this summer, the superintendent was there and was very involved in the discussion about information security. I was happy to see that because you don’t get that. A lot of private sector, uh, companies.
[00:42:33] Mike Dronen: No, you don’t want it. So that’s an interesting thing too, because If you look at the highest performing superintendents in K- 12 and I could say, you know, I could say state or federal government probably, but I’m K 12 is what I know. So if you look at the highest performing Ceo’s in K 12, they could probably run any high performing private sector company just because of the skill set.
[00:43:00] Evan Francen: Um I agree with that.
[00:43:02] Mike Dronen: You know, you know, not every superintendents made the same and we’re fortunate to have one that’s got a ton of experience and a vision for the future. I mean, you, you stereotypically think of a younger superintendent is having more vision for the future than somebody who um, is at the top of their career right now. Um but you look at Dr Peterson and you know, he was pushing me the other day when I was working on my board report because I said, I said dr Peterson, you know, what are, what are the technologies that you would have hoped we’d have on our classrooms now that are in our classrooms. And he’s like, well 20 years ago I was saying we need to figure out some type of technology so we can have five different small group conversations in a classroom in the open and there’s some type of noise canceling technology so that this group can’t hear that group, can’t hear that group and I’m like, I’ve never heard an idea like that, but that’s kind of cool, you know, so so having that support um so important, just so important. We talked on saturday with our fellow Czech directors. We talked about how do you manage up, how do you help a new administrator? You know, maybe been a superintendent 3456789 years. Moved from moving from district to district. How do you help them be successful in supporting what the current school district needs to do around information security. So it’s Artwork in K- 12 just like it is in the private
[00:44:26] Evan Francen: sector. Okay, so this the ceo I’m sorry, the superintendent, same sort of thing. The superintendent in schools really can it sounds like make or break the success of the security program in the school. Is that fair?
[00:44:42] Mike Dronen: Yeah, no, that’s that’s totally fair. If the superintendent gets it um you can you can you can move forward with whatever you whatever you need. I feel like if I needed a tool, I say I needed some more blinky lights for whatever and had a short conversation with dr Peterson, he’d be like, go ahead mike, make, you know, make the best move. It’s it’s money well spent. It’s not that we’ve got money coming all right left were funded right about in the middle in terms of school districts from the state. Um But I feel that support, the support would definitely be there. I mean how many? So for example like when you came out and visited with our admin team, we essentially have two days, all of our district administrators together during the summer to do vision planning. We’ve got a lot of agenda and one day of that is just everybody given their reports. So we really only have one day to get through that content. When I asked Dr Peterson when we were planning last year, hey, can we get a couple hours in the afternoon to talk about information security? He asked me why and I gave just the briefest of conversations and he said, absolutely, that sounds, that sounds great. So um, yeah, that’s very clearly good.
[00:45:49] Evan Francen: So, and I, I’m wondering in a to do school boards ask much about security. I mean in your opinion, not necessarily, you know, specifically going to talk about maybe in your discussions with other, you know, piers and other school districts. Is that a regular conversation with the school board is talking about information security or is that not?
[00:46:11] Mike Dronen: No, it’s not. I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t see it coming up. You know what I, what I tend to see is china two types of school board. The school board that lean started managing the administration at a micro level, which is not a functional board in any organization. And then and then a school board that knows its role in government governance and really works in a, in a more managed consultative evaluative process with the administration and there’s a strong trust between both and that’s, that’s what we’re fortunate to have here in Minnetonka. And they have, they have always welcomed my conversation. So this, this fall I presented to the board and I said, hey, well I just want to give you an update on how we’re doing on our security project. I’ve framed it as a three year project, but security is always, you’re never done. And they said, great, we want to check in. So I just, you know, shared 20 minutes of, here’s what we’re doing here is what we learned. Here’s what rat, you know, they were pleased to have it. I mean, so on our school board, amongst other folks, we’ve got a former target employee, you know, so we know target, right? Um, we got a former air traffic controller so you know, knows FAA knows all that type stuff. We’ve got some, a number of business folks on that board that, that they get, they get security, they get the need for it. They understand invest now and save a ton of lost opportunity or whatever in the future. So, but I wish, I wish we had more boards asking those questions and I think superintendents can guide that our role as tech directors and CTO types is to help our superintendents. Um, see see what, what more we can do in this space.
[00:47:48] Evan Francen: Sure, that makes sense. So what tips, what tips do we have? You know, me, you uh brad, what tips are there for administrators with information security, do we have any specific, you know, best practices that we could advise,
[00:48:07] Mike Dronen: Nope, not a single one out
[00:48:09] Evan Francen: there.
[00:48:12] Mike Dronen: Well, you know, uh my set of 10 is probably going to be similar to a lot of other folks, but at the end we’ll probably have 15 on there. Set of best practices for administrators. I think number one information security does not belong in the I. T. Department. It’s everybody’s responsibility. Here’s how we’re gonna do it. Here’s how
[00:48:32] Evan Francen: I could give you a hug right now mike. I would do it, but I can’t get through
[00:48:36] Brad Nigh: the phone.
[00:48:37] Mike Dronen: Okay. Can probably good. I’m not, heaven’s pretty strong. If you guys haven’t met him, he could probably crush you just like that. No, no, no. Um So I I probably throw that up there as number one, everybody’s responsibility. We need to do it. Number two, I would play on the heartstrings of what brings people to education. We love our kids and care for our kids. So if that’s really true, let’s make sure we don’t mess up and You know, leak out their personally identifiable information. So some nefarious folks have access to it for 17 years of you know, false credit reporting. You know, I think the last time I looked a full student record is worth about 700 bucks. I mean that’s that’s money. So yeah, I’d throw that out There is number two, uh, number three, you know, let your superintendent administrators know that you’re here to help them be successful to reduce risk in your district and that you can do this work without impacting programs And then take a # four, take a longer view. Right? So this isn’t something that’s going to get done in four weeks, six weeks, six months. You’re gonna take a multi your view. So do do a three year plan and walk it all the way back and towards the front end of it. That’s where you’re gonna start front loading it with just some basic tips for your teachers. So even if even if the only technical tip you provided the teachers was how to figure out what an email address looks like after the at sign. Um, and hey, you know, if it shouldn’t look like gmail, you know, because it’s coming from, you know, your superintendent, you and you don’t use google, you don’t use gmail in your district, you know, maybe think twice about it. Same with the U. R. L. Right? If it looks like this should be something from the government agency, but it’s not gov or you know, ST dot m and at us, whatever. Maybe think twice about it. So the training piece for teachers is gonna be huge and then, um, fifth piece, I think we’re up to five right now, something like that. Um, think about how, how can I do programming with my students. So in Minnetonka we have a group of kids called the tech bates and they help us with little projects and they’re kind of our, and we provide insider info to them and they’re really cool group of kids. There’s so many cool groups of kids in Minnetonka and once in a while there’ll be something on the radar. They’ll say, hey, did you hear about this out of the other thing? And, and we’ll say no and we will consider it an event until we follow up on it and most of them just are, you know, just a story and there’s not much to it, but once in a while there is, so that’s super helpful. Um, I know why’s that has got a great cybersecurity program for kids have been running it for a few years. We just started one this year and that’s just been a hoot. It’s been a really cool to work with the kids. And then I’ve got a mentee named Jacob at the high school who is working on a one year project to to detect ransom where and so we helped him build a small land in our high school off network, You know, we got him a 48 port switch, a bunch of systems and it’s been really cool working with him and seeing what he’s learning and he’s probably not going to discover anything super crazy this year, but the stories, he’ll be able to tell the kids around him and what he’s working on, just really, really valuable. So I mean those would be a couple of things I throw throw out there. Um, and then you know, let your superintendent know that he or she is not alone. Other superintendents are thinking about these things too. Right.
[00:51:58] Evan Francen: I’m gonna, I’m gonna go back, I’m going to create a transcript out of this because I think there’s a great article here. You know, those are, those are awesome tips mike. So thanks for saying that. Thanks. How about tips for, for educators? You know, they have a unique challenge because they’re dealing, you know, I think more directly with kids on a regular basis, dealing with all kinds of new social media things. I mean I have so much respect for the teachers, you know, where my kids go to school. Um,
[00:52:27] Mike Dronen: right. Yeah. I mean teachers man talk about a separate breed of really cool cat, you know, just so awesome. My neighbor, my neighbor’s a teacher, middle school teacher next to me here where I live and came home from thanksgiving and he adds my, he cleaned off my driveway, which is big and I’m like, Pat, he’s like how you know, just like appreciate having you as a neighbor. I mean talk about just an all around awesome person as well as being an incredible teacher, but tips for teachers. So here we go, Number one teacher, um, remember this phrase student over shoulder otherwise known as is somebody trying to figure out your password because every day there looking where your fingers are on the keyboard, Tip # one student over shoulder, be aware of that, that’s like pretty important tip number two teachers um what are you doing with your roster data? Did you find a really cool Edtech product service, whatever it is and you want to dump your roster data up to this company and see how cool it is. Don’t do it, talk to I. T. First, let’s make sure we got the vetted and we’re good to go. So item number two, item number three um teachers, you gotta, you have a huge influence. Um the parents of your kids and those parents can really set them up for a ton more success and they want to, I mean there’s no parent that doesn’t love their kid and every parent is sending, they’re not keeping their good kids at home and just sending you the most challenging ones, they’re sending their best kids. So so just give give your parents the best you can and that’s going to include some tips related to social media and managing kids and not letting them compute in the bedroom and here’s how you actually can take their devices at night and you know Emily until the morning, whatever it is. Um So what do we have? 2123 4/4 tip for teacher uh reach out to your tech team. The text that, you know, are probably quirky and weird and odd and strange and, and all those things that some, some technicians are, but they’re working in the school not because they can’t find work other, otherwise they’re working there because they probably care about kids too. So, you know, reach out, feel free to reach out and then tip number five just to keep it short is, um, because I see this all the time, I’ll have a teacher say, hey, mike, do you think, you know, it’s probably not possible, but would it be possible to fill in the blank? And so many of the requests I get from teachers are, they’re pretty good ideas, but they think they’re really hard to implement. And for us sometimes it’s super trivial to implement something that could make a huge difference. And so ask you, ask your textbooks, hey, is this possible? Could we do this? So yeah,
[00:55:11] Brad Nigh: I’m gonna add one. I think that the teachers maybe don’t think about is, you know, watch for the communicate with the parents and, and watching for signs of, uh, the bullying because you know, they’re going to see him. So cyber bullying, not just like in person, but cyber bullying has become such an issue and I think teachers have a, you know, maybe a little bit more insight into some of that than they realize. So yeah,
[00:55:37] Mike Dronen: that’s great brad. That’s really great. Yeah, When the kids can’t get away from the conversation anymore, right? It used to be just at school now, it’s everywhere.
[00:55:45] Evan Francen: 1 1 of the things that that I when we met last mike, uh was that common sense media or common sense? Education, common sense media dot org. Uh there’s a lot of great tips there too for educators and for parents, because that was kind of the last one was And what tips do we have for parents? I mean, I think there’s so many things going on and so I think it’s more difficult today than ever to protect your kids from social media, to protect your kids from cyberbullying to protect your kids from sexual predators and sex trafficking and it’s just crazy. So what advice do we have for parents?
[00:56:25] Mike Dronen: So a couple of things, so hop over to the minutes just minutes ago, public schools, right. Find it on the web. Find that a technology department, we’ve got a fairly decent built out section on stuff for parents. Everything from just some basic parenting tips to the intersection of parenting and technology and the team I work with has done a really nice job building that content. And what’s great is they keep it up to date as well. So when organizations like leading medical organizations say, you know, we were kind of wrong about the screen time thing. It’s it’s not about how much time you spend on screen, it’s about the kinds of things you’re doing when you’re on screen. So that was just 23 years ago. They? Re evaluated that so we keep that type of stuff updated so so go there, grab some tips, common sense media, we refer to them there another great resource as well. Um
[00:57:17] Brad Nigh: Yeah uh the, the I am cyber safe dot org. Uh the spi I C squared that’s the volunteer, they have some free resources out there around for parents on, you know, safe shopping, gaming, cyberbullying, some top tips and stuff like that.
[00:57:34] Mike Dronen: You know, one of the, so for parents to just know that it’s better now than it was four or five years ago, four or five years ago. A lot of this information online was parents, the world’s falling apart. There’s nothing you can do about it, the bad people are worse than you’ve ever than you could even imagine and that that’s kind of moderated a little bit more in terms of the communication, it’s more empowering now parents here are the threats and the challenges but here are things you can do and you can do these things effectively. It’s more, I feel like that part of the industry and some of these are non profits that are driven for a lot of different kinds of motivations that shifted a little a little bit more and there’s some there’s some pretty decent ones out there, just like we’ve been talking about. So
[00:58:14] Evan Francen: good stuff. So the show notes are on Evan francine dot com and this is episode 58 if you want to find the show notes. Because what I’m gonna do is all update the show notes with some of these links, you know, the links to your or linked to your page there at the main attack, a school district in the technology department. I’ll make some links there. And these other ones that we’ve talked about because I think parents,
[00:58:40] Brad Nigh: they want to learn more, there’s, they don’t know where to go when it’s
[00:58:45] Evan Francen: overwhelming and there’s and there’s like a billion places to go. Right? So if we all keep pointing in the same places, they’ll find their way there.
[00:58:53] Mike Dronen: Yeah, agree, agree.
[00:58:55] Evan Francen: Alright, well, great discussion. Uh, we’re getting close to a time here, uh, some real challenges in K through 12 and mike. Seriously, really, really good advice. I loved your insight, loved your perspective. Thanks for sharing that with us.
[00:59:10] Mike Dronen: Oh, I appreciate it. I appreciate all that you guys do as well. So it’s been fun.
[00:59:14] Evan Francen: Yeah, it’s good to fight the fight with good people.
[00:59:17] Mike Dronen: Yeah, that’s for sure.
[00:59:19] Evan Francen: Right? So we have some news. I’m not going to spend any time really on the news because we are coming up against time, which is fine. I’d rather spend time talking about what we talked about it in the news anyway, but there’s three things that I had picked out for the news this week. One was new Orleans uh ransomware attack. First time we’ve ever heard a city getting hit with ransomware I’m sure uh would be fun to dig into that one a little bit because I do think that our cities, our government, you know counties, uh they need our help sometimes. You know, it’s kind of our civic duty. I kind of feel that and we did that a while back on the podcast where we give people tips and tricks on how to deal with county administrators or city people. But anyway, there’s another attack there. You probably heard about it. They declared a state of emergency, whatever the largest hospital system in New Jersey was hit by ransomware attack. So that was another news article that we’re not really going to talk about now. But another one was the 750,000 applications for US birth certificate copies were exposed online. Now they’re links for all of these um uh on Evan francine dot com. But 752,000 applications for copies of birth certificates were found on an Amazon web services storage bucket. Oh my gosh, people can’t secure their containers. Ah Anyway that’s that if you want to find out more about that. Uh go to the show notes and you can find those links. Yeah. Yeah I get to kind of wrapped around what it wrapped around an axle wrapped around something.
[01:00:57] Mike Dronen: It’s crazy. Crazy. Crazy
[01:00:59] Evan Francen: isn’t it? And it’s good to to, you know, stay on top of the news? I mean that’s another thing that parents educators, we can all do is just try to stay aware of the things that are going on in the world. You know, the last thing you want to do is kind of be caught unaware right that there are actually interests here.
[01:01:16] Mike Dronen: You know, And I mean I know we talk about breach fatigue all the time, but just just because the N. S. A. Had a little problem or you know, or a big problem or fill in the blank. Right? It doesn’t mean it has to happen to us. We can we can do some things.
[01:01:30] Evan Francen: Absolutely. Usually you’ll find yourself back at the basics. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that’s it. Episode 58 is a wrap. Thank you again, Mike for joining us and sharing your perspectives on K through 12 and just information security in general. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you to our listeners. Keep the questions and feedback coming. Send things to us. You know, nice things. Don’t send a nice things. Uh send it to us by email at un security at proton mail dot com. If you have something you’d like us to talk about something you’d like us to address. We’re just tips that you like like us to do better. Let us know. Uh if you’re the social type socialize with us on twitter. I’m @EvanFrancen Brad’s @BradNigh. Mike is there a place that you want people to interact with you? You have a twitter account or anything? You want people to get in touch with
[01:02:22] Mike Dronen: you? Yeah, you can find me on twitter at @MikeDronen.
[01:02:28] Evan Francen: Nice. Alright. And lastly, be sure to follow security studio and fr secure for more goodies. We’re always trying to make things better and make things freer. Uh That’s it. So we’ll talk to you again next week.
