Faith-Based Daily Awareness Post 3 September 2025

These updates are shared to help raise the situational awareness of Faith-Based organizations to best defend against and mitigate the impacts from all-hazards threats including physical security, cybersecurity, and natural disasters. 

Your FBI: Crushing Violent Crime 

In the press released title “Your FBI: Crushing Violent Crime,” the FBI announced a sweeping, six-week series of operations set to unfold throughout September and October to confront violent crime on multiple fronts. FBI Director Kash Patel emphasized that fulfilling his commitment to “crush violent crime” underpins this initiative.

The bureau is coordinating with local, state, and federal partners to disrupt several major threats, including:

• Launching a nationwide surge targeting individuals involved in the sexual exploitation of children and the production of related materials.
• Mobilizing task forces to dismantle transitional criminal organizations engaged in:
  • Drug trafficking
  • Money laundering
  • Weapons trafficking
  • Human trafficking and smuggling
  • Homicide
  • Extortion
  • Kidnapping
  • Other serious crimes
• Concluding a months-long, proactive operation across all 55 FBI field offices aimed at violent offenders.
• Deploying unprecedented national resources to address crimes in Indian Country, particularly those connected to missing or murdered Indigenous people.

Analyst Comments: The FBI’s new imitative highlights a proactive, multi-agency approach to tackling violent crimes, with a strong focus on child exploitation, organized crimes, and crimes in Indian Country. The campaign signals an effort to boost public trust and visibility, but lasting success will require pairing enforcement with community-based prevention and addressing deeper social drivers of violence.

As we have seen in places in LA and DC, increased Federal police presence has received some pushback in some communities, and there is potential that this initiative could lead to similar responses elsewhere across the country. Organizations should also keep in mind the next call for mass protests, scheduled for October 18.

Upcoming Webinars of Interest

Department of Homeland Security Hosts Webinars to Strengthen Safety and Security at Faith and Community Organizations

In support of National Preparedness Month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center for Faith is encouraging leaders at faith-based institutions to take steps to enhance their security and that of their communities. Over the course of several weeks, DHS is hosting a series of webinars designed to share practical tools, resources and actions that can assist communities to increase the safety of their places of worship across the country. These webinars will focus on topics like: 

• Suspicious Activity Recognition and Response.
• Bomb Threat Assessment.
• Active Shooter Preparedness.
• Surveillance Detection Principles. 
• Conflict Prevention Strategies.

Encore Presentation of the Return to School 2025 Virtual Event

The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Team (NTAC) will host a replay of their school safety event which highlights the Center’s latest release, titled Aligning Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management With a Multi-tiered System of Support: Building a Continuum of Prevention and Intervention. NTAC’s newest publication was published in partnership with the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and focuses on how education practitioners can best align BTAM programs alongside multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) in K-12 schools. This event will further highlight key findings and implications from NTAC’s decades of research and guidance on school violence prevention.

This free virtual event is appropriate for educators, school and district administrators, counselors, school psychologists, BTAM team members and coordinators, MTSS and PBIS leadership teams, state education agency personnel, law enforcement officers, and other school safety partners.

The encore virtual event will be held on September 17^th, 2025, from 12 to 2:30 PM EST via Microsoft Teams.

Weekly Security Sprint EP 125. Hostile Events, AI driven Ransomware, and more!

The Gate 15 Security Sprint is a weekly rundown of the week’s notable all-hazards security news, risks and threats and some of the key focus areas for organizations to consider behind the headlines. Gate 15 team members discuss physical security, cybersecurity, natural hazards, health threats and other issues across our environment.

In this week’s Weekly Security Spring Dave and Andy discuss:

• Annunciation Catholic Church Attack
• Hoax Active Shooter Reports
• AI & Cyber Threats
• Countering Chinese State-Sponsored Actors Compromise of Network Worldwide to Feed Global Espionage System

The above Gate 15 Weekly Security Sprint website also provides links to many security-related items of interest.

Information on other Gate 15 podcasts can be found at Podcast.

Patch it or Pay: Closing the Door on Exploits

The Gate 15 article “Patch It or Pay: Closing the Door on Exploits” stresses that while zero-day vulnerabilities often dominate headlines, most ransomware incidents continue to stem from long-known but unpatched flaws. Effective patch management is therefore presented as a critical defense against exploitation. The piece highlights the importance of leveraging resources like CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog to prioritize remediation efforts, since it identifies vulnerabilities actively targeted by adversaries. Case studies such as the Log4Shell exploit a CLFS zero-day demonstrate the devastating consequences of both old and new vulnerabilities when left unaddressed. The blog argues that patching should not be viewed as a stand-alone task but as a core part of comprehensive Vulnerability Management program, emphasizing that failure to patch leaves organizations exposed to significant security and operational risks.