By Richard Smith

The horrific events in Parkland, Florida, Sutherland Springs, Texas, and, unfortunately, other locations around the U.S., have propelled a nationwide conversation on preventing and responding to an active shooter situation. This dialogue has led to an increase in training focused on empowering people to take action—to heed the DHS recommendation to ‘run, hide, fight’. By taking part in this discussion and participating in these trainings, we’re actively working to reduce the number of victims.

These critical conversations are one (very important) piece of the puzzle. We must also have a frank discussion about what happens if prevention fails. Essential to surviving the first ten minutes of a critical incident—whether it be an active shooter scenario or a significant weather event—is knowing how to control severe blood loss.

Recent mass casualty events, like last year’s hotel shooting in Las Vegas or the Boston Marathon bombings, saw lives saved as bystanders—“immediate responders” if you will—began administering aid before trained first responders arrived. Many of these immediate responders were medical, military, or off-duty law enforcement personnel who had one thing in common: hemorrhage control training.

The role of the immediate responder is a crucial one in helping people survive future active shooter events. Consider that the average EMS response time in an urban area is seven minutes—longer in rural areas—and even after EMS has arrived on scene, there may still be a delay as law enforcement secures the area. Yet a person can bleed to death in three to five minutes, depending on the severity of injury.

Can every one of those victims afford those seven minutes, or more? We must train and equip employees, security, teachers, and, sadly, even our children, to survive should the worst happen.

Join me on Wednesday, 26 September at the 2018 Global Security Exchange GSX 2018 for Session #6221, Surviving the First 10 Minutes: Increasing The Ability to Survive in Critical Trauma Incidents. I will present on the role of the immediate responder and demonstrate equipment recommended for their use.

By Brittany Galli

Why do we consistently wonder why we aren’t farther ahead in our profession or respected like we want to be? The 5 essential traits of great leaders reflect personal attributes, not roles inherent to the position. We sometimes forget how these foundational steps are the things that can either earn us the next promotion or lose us the job.

Grow Your EQ and Connections: Make authentic, valuable, strategic connections and foster them. Manners in the workplace should not be forgotten. Have you said thank you to every person on your team this week for something they’ve done, something they’ve delivered or for the way they acted in a situation?

Use Your Resources: On LinkedIn, always send a note with any connection you make. Something as simple as “Great connecting with you- let me know if I can ever help you” or “Great hearing your thoughts today on ESRM – have a great week ahead.” can help you in the future more than you know.

Be the Mentor You Would Want: Mentors get the most workplace kudos. People in the workplace will talk about you in one light or another – it’s your responsibility to make them say things like “He’s a great mentor,” or “She really helped me when I couldn’t figure out how to deal with this person.”

Self-Promotion: How do you promote yourself? Do you hang 5k T-shirts in your office or desk? Do people even know you outside of work? Do they know that you give away 100 lbs. of canned goods to families during the month? Or help with a foster agency in your spare time? Promote yourself in all facets of life and what keeps you going – people want to connect with people and they need topics to do so.

Millennials are Starving for Wisdom – Use Them! It’s now a widely found statistic that members of older generations who are receiving promotions are the ones that leverage younger generations to learn how to get ahead. Learn from millennials in your life – harness them for a 1 hour per week meeting to learn something you don’t know – Excel, Instagram or how to share photos on your phone via airdrop. Then – reward them for it. Offer your own knowledge of a leadership craft or strategy they haven’t experienced yet.

Join us Tuesday, September 25th at 11 am to learn more about these topics and Multigenerational Strategic Leadership Guidance: How to be Seen, with a strategic roadmap presented by Maria Dominguez, CPP – SVP, Bank of America and Brittany Galli – Chief Success Officer, Mobotour.

By Timothy Brewer

With 2017 and 2018 both setting unfortunate new records for the number of active shooter situations, the very real and growing threat of armed assailant attacks is clear. Events such as the school shootings in Parkland, FL and Sante Fe, Texas remind us that such atrocities are regularly perpetrated against the most vulnerable members of our society, and as security professionals we must do all that we can to address this issue.

Much excellent work is being conducted to better understand behavioral science, identify indicators of a potential attacker, and secure facilities, but such measures can never be 100% effective, and tragically, 71% of attackers are able to walk legitimately and unhindered through the entrance of the facility that they are about to attack.

The average active assailant attack lasts 12.5 minutes, while the average police response time is 18 minutes, so the majority of victims in such scenarios must therefore either attempt to escape or survive within their environment. Training, drills, and communication are key components in reducing the impacts of such attacks, but security professionals should also be aware of the role that the physical fabric of the school can play in preserving life. The opportunities to exit the building quickly, safely, and without coming into contact with the attacker(s) should be maximized, and where exit is either not possible or not advised due to the threat, physical protective measures should provide an effective shelter for occupants.

In Las Vegas this September, I will be discussing the psychology and movement of building occupants during an active assailant event and describing how security design and assessment can benefit from a better understanding of the implications of the building layout on the outcomes of the attack. Attendees can gain insight into design examples which demonstrably improve and hinder building egress under conditions of panic; better understand existing and upcoming industry guidance document on this topic; and will be able to take this knowledge into their own organizations to encourage leaders to innovate security design for active assailant threats.

Join us for Evaluating the Safety of Building Layouts In Light of Active Assailant Threats at 3:45 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 26, at Global Security Exchange (GSX), powered by ASIS International.

By Travis Rothbloom

The computer. The internet. The smartphone. What’s next? Many believe that Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will be mankind’s next giant leap and there are already instances where their influence has affected the security industry.

For the planning stages, the past decade has seen major improvements to building and infrastructure design with the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM). These 3D digital representations contain much more data than the traditional floorplan drawing, enabling security engineers and consultants to finalize much more of the system design early on and expedite its construction. For renovation and fit-out projects, 3D scanning gives these planners much more confidence that their renovation models are compatible with an existing site.

BIM models can also be experienced in VR. Designers can then simulate various scenarios, such as a break-in robbery or a mass evacuation due to a suspicious package, and allow different stakeholders to witness and choose between different design options based on how the situations play out. In another example, developers can be more easily convinced that spending more money up-front on landscaping that’s in accordance with Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CEPTD) is easily justifiable with the extra feeling of safety it brings. Security teams can begin training on their responses to various situations long before any shovels hit the dirt.

AR differs from VR in that instead of immersing somebody into a different virtual world, it takes virtual elements and places them in the real world. This enables:
• Construction workers to digitally ensure that a building has been completed to its design specifications by overlaying the BIM model in full 3D onto the site
• Security teams to continue training to virtual crisis scenarios overlaid onto their actual building
• Public to receive, to their smartphones, visual step-by-step directions to the proper evacuation or lockdown location
• Guards and first responders to react to active security situations while having real-time access to the electronic security systems at their fingertips

On the last point above, the rise of AR along with 3D sensing systems integrated into CCTV can allow a responder to effectively see people through walls, ceilings, and floors. The responder can then simply point to a door to place it in lockdown to better manage the situation. AR can also take a 3D scan of a past crime scene and overlay it back onto its original location, allowing for more detailed forensic analysis.

Join me on Monday, September 24th at GSX 2018 for Session #4301, How Augmented and Virtual Reality Affect Security. I will be presenting on all of the above use cases and giving a live demonstration of what the future has in store.

By Steve Reinharz

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution brings new technologies into daily life. We’ve seen AI usage in diagnostic applications within the healthcare industry and in the emergence of self-driving cars, and with the growth experienced in these areas, it’s become hard to avoid AI’s massive implications around the world.

But how can security move beyond Siri and Alexa and harness the power of AI to enhance security operations? There are several ways:

• Advanced video analytics: Video analytics is one of the first major domains within the security industry that is being radically transformed by AI – and this is already in practice in many organizations today. AI enables video analytics to do much more than just alert users when a person or object has crossed a barrier.
• Operational efficiencies: Smart security solutions, such as video management systems or networked access control and visitor management, now can take the data being collected and correlate it with patterns in behavior for employees and visitors to a facility. This data, in turn, can be used to find ways that an organization can increase efficiencies and save valuable resources.
• Connecting devices through IoT: AI brings multiple data points together to be analyzed and transformed into actionable intelligence that can be used to solve real-world problems. AI makes it possible to take these multiple streams of information and make it meaningful and useful.
• Robotics: Robotic technology has taken the world by storm, but it isn’t possible without the power of AI at the heart of the technology.
• Decision-making: AI-enabled technology has the potential to take the guesswork out of answering alarms by determining which events require a call to law enforcement and which are false alarms. While much of this technology is still in prototypes, the potential is real.

As part of the upcoming GSX Conference hosted by ASIS International, I will be joined by other experts in the field to talk about how to incorporate the best of AI technology, including video analytics, robotics, and license plate recognition, into today’s security operations procedures. Attendees can gain insight into the latest AI-powered technologies that can streamline operations, increase efficiency, and enhance security across an enterprise, and will be able to take this knowledge into their own organizations to drive leaders to innovate security operations procedures.

Join us for “Update Security Operations Procedures with the AI Technology” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 25, at the Global Security Exchange (GSX), powered by ASIS International.

By Christopher Frenz

With the pandemic ransomware attacks of both WannaCry and NotPetya devastating companies around the globe, ransomware was a prominent headline in 2017. It’s estimated that in 2017, companies recovering from these and other ransomware attacks incurred $5 billion in damages.

One of the hardest hit industries was healthcare—as readily demonstrated by the UK’s National Health Service, Erie County Medical Center, and other hospitals that fell victim to various types of ransomware. WannaCry in particular exposed just how devastating a ransomware attack can be on the healthcare industry, as it not only impacted systems that store patient data, it also resulted in the encryption of medical devices. WannaCry concretely demonstrated that vulnerabilities in medical devices have the potential to impact patient care and patient safety. This attack established a wholly new and wholly unacceptable meaning for the term denial of service.

Comprehensive guidance for preventing, mitigating, responding to, and recovering from ransomware attacks can be found in the OWASP Anti-Ransomware Guide, and security guidance for protecting medical device deployments can be found in the OWASP Secure Medical Device Deployment Standard. One particularly effective control present in both guidance sets is that of network segmentation—as a segmented network can help to isolate threats and prevent them from spreading throughout an organization.

Join me on Wednesday 26 September at GSX 2018 for Session 6133, A Zero Trust Approach to Information Security, to see how network segmentation can be taken to the next level and a zero trust network created to stop the spread of malware and other threats throughout any organization.