“This has been, as you know, an incredibly difficult situation for our community,” she continued. She said a third-party company is “meticulously reviewing all the documents released by the threat actor” and that the district has “not yet been provided with the results of that review.” In an email, district spokesperson Crystina Lugo-Beach declined interview requests from The 74. Maps document the routes that children are instructed to take should an emergency force them to evacuate their buildings. Videos and PowerPoint presentations offer instructions on how to arm and disarm a campus alarm system. States nationwide have ramped up efforts to digitize their campus security layouts, and since the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last year, several have rolled out multi-million dollar digital map initiatives in hopes they help improve police response times.Īlong with insight into campus layouts and surveillance camera placements, the leaked Minneapolis records pinpoint the locations of fire alarms, security keypads, gas meters and water shutoff valves. The records, which outline specific, technical details about security systems in Minneapolis schools, can be downloaded with little more than a Google search. The data encompasses more than 189,000 individual files totaling 143 gigabytes. The records were published online in March after the district refused the cyber criminals’ demand for $1 million to keep the highly sensitive information from becoming public. The school security records, including blueprints of campuses citywide, were uncovered in an analysis by The 74 of confidential files purportedly stolen from the Minneapolis school district by the ransomware gang Medusa. The information, she noted, is already in the hands of known threat actors. “Folks are already on edge with what’s been going on in schools and the fact that they got all of the security information and then think about who has it,” said Marika Pfefferkorn, a Minnesota-based student privacy activist and executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation. Security experts said the startling revelation puts students and staff citywide at risk of physical danger at a moment when mass school shootings have reached record highs, including a March attack in Nashville where police say the shooter relied on a hand-drawn map. That’s because they’re now readily available online, an investigation by The 74 has found. The specific locations of the campus surveillance cameras, and other sensitive details about the school’s physical security infrastructure, are attainable without ever stepping foot inside. A second camera positioned on the right picks them up as they walk down the hallway and a third keeps a watchful eye as they pass by the gym. This story was produced by The 74, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America.Īs a visitor approaches the front entrance of a Minneapolis elementary school, their every move is documented by a security camera.
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