School Staff, Law Enforcement Encouraged to Attend Threat Assessment Sessions; Last Call for NSGP Grant Applications; New Expired Password Phishing Campaign; FBI Report: Hate Crimes Increase by Nearly 12 Percent

The New Jersey Department of Education’s Office of School Preparedness and Emergency Planning is encouraging school staff and law enforcement to attend over the next six months additional offerings of the General Awareness virtual sessions for behavioral threat assessment and management in schools. The two-hour General Awareness sessions provide an overview of behavioral threat assessment and management in schools, including risk factors, triggers and stressors and warning behaviors that could impact an at-risk individual's decision to commit an act of targeted violence. The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center and the U.S. Department of Education recommended schools create threat assessment teams and procedures, prompting Gov. Phil Murphy to sign legislation Aug. 1 that requires the State’s public, charter and renaissance schools to establish such teams. Secret Service studies revealed that “red flags” or warning signs were present in almost all acts of kindergarten through 12th-grade targeted violence. NJDOE’s OSPEP is encouraging school staff, teachers, coaches, school board members, local law enforcement and other community members to attend the sessions. These sessions, provided through the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance Students, Teachers, and Officers Preventing School Violence Act Grant Program, are for awareness purposes and do not replace “Basic K-12 Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Training.”

If interested, register for a session below:

• Monday, May 8 from 10 AM - 12 PM
• Tuesday, June 6 from 10 AM - 12 PM
• Monday, June 12 from 6 PM - 8 PM
• Monday, June 26 from 5 PM - 7 PM
• Friday, July 7 from 10 AM - 12 PM

Questions can be directed to OSPEP at school.security@doe.nj.gov or 609-376-3574.

Threat actors are posing as Office 365 in a phishing campaign first observed by the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell earlier this month. The email informs recipients that their password will expire soon and directs a recipient to click on the included link to avoid losing access to their account. However, if clicked, the link directs the user to a phishing page that impersonates Microsoft and attempts to steal their login information. If submitted, threat actors can obtain the user’s credentials to potentially use in future attacks. The NJCCIC advises users to refrain from clicking on links in unexpected emails. As threat actors may impersonate well-known services and hosting providers, the NJCCIC encourages users to verify a website's legitimacy before entering login credentials and should enable multifactor authentication where possible. More information, including indicators associated with this campaign, can be found on the NJCCIC’s website.

According to the FBI’s recently released supplemental hate crime statistics, reported bias-motivated attacks in the U.S. increased by 11.6 percent in 2021, with nearly 65 percent of those racially motivated. Law enforcement’s low participation rates nationwide due to a new reporting system appear to have marred the original report, released in December 2022, indicating a slight decrease in the number of overall hate crimes. Less than two-thirds of law enforcement agencies reported data in December, including New York, Los Angeles and Miami. The supplemental report includes more than 3,000 agencies that retroactively submitted their 2021 statistics to create a more accurate representation of the hate crime landscape. Overall, departments reported 12,411 individuals as hate crime victims in 2021 and of that amount, bias crime offenders targeted 64.5 percent for their race or ethnicity, 15.9 percent for their sexual orientation and 14.1 percent for their religion. Attacks against Jewish individuals accounted for more than half of the religiously motivated hate crimes reported. Nearly 3,800 incidents involved targeted property, with the report categorizing 71 percent of those incidents as destruction, damage or vandalism. Officials said 79 percent of law enforcement agencies are now enrolled in the new data collection system.