In Deep with the FBI Agent by Lynne Silver Read Free Book Online Page B

private schools? He gave it a moment’s thought and decided it wasn’t. To be sure, he’d run it by Ted on Monday.
      
    Monday morning, icy water bottle in hand, Casey headed into the weekly administrative staff meeting. As soon as she entered the conference room, she knew something was up. Head of School Nancy Clinton was huddled with Dan Polk, who was the systems administrator for the school. He ran the school network, and if anyone needed IT help, they called on Dan. It was odd that Nancy herself would be meeting with Dan instead of having her admin deal with any IT issues.
    At nine-thirty, Nancy called the meeting to order and everyone found their seats. Instead of going through the agenda and ticking off last week’s action items as she usually did, Nancy started the meeting with a bang.
    “Dan is here because we heard about other private schools having data breaches, and we are taking preventative measures,” she said bluntly, and glanced in Casey’s direction at her loud indrawn breath.
    “Something you need to share, Casey?”
    Casey shook her head. “No, go on.”
    “Dan is here to ask you to change your passwords, and he’s going to go over some of the new rules about password requirements.”
    Dan took the floor and went into agonizing detail about capital letters, numbers, and do’s and don’ts of passwords, and then handed the meeting back to Nancy.
    “We’re going to upgrade our information security systems,” she said. “Additionally, we will write new policies and procedures about what to do in the event we have a data breach. We want to do everything we can to prevent it”—she gave a rueful look around the table—“because you can imagine how our parent body would take it.”
    Casey and her colleagues could imagine. It wasn’t a pretty scenario. The parents at this school were the movers and shakers of Washington. They’d panic if their children’s grades or their yearly income was in the public domain.
    “In the meantime, everyone must change their passwords to be in accordance with the new protocol Dan laid out.” Nancy nodded as if the matter were done. “Any questions before we move on to old business?” She gave everyone exactly 1.2 seconds to think before turning the focus to Casey and asking about the status of responses for the upcoming reunions and whether they’d issued a special invitation to someone from the class who was a local celebrity working on the evening news.
    The rest of the meeting passed quickly, and after the meeting, Casey headed back to her office, but returned to the conference room when she realized she’d left her water bottle inside.
    She paused outside the door when she heard voices from within, and wanted to give the people still in the room time to finish their conversation. She didn’t mean to overhear, but, really, Nancy’s Boston accent was pretty recognizable, and Dan’s deep voice was hard to disguise. Casey froze outside the door, meaning to either knock or come back later, but their conversation kept her glued outside.
    “I want you working on this twenty-four seven.” That was Nancy.
    “Will do. I’ll find the source of the hack and what systems were compromised,” Dan replied.
    “Excellent. I’m hopeful we can investigate and clean this up in-house without having to report anything to the parent body.”
    Casey’s mind whirled.
    Montgomery Prep had been hacked? Didn’t they have to report the cyber attack to the proper authorities? But…what did that mean for Sam and for her? Wasn’t it a crime not to report something?
    She waited a second to gather her composure and then knocked on the door, waited another second, then opened it. “Oh, hey, guys. Sorry to interrupt. I left my water bottle.” She stepped hesitantly in the room, and Dan brushed past her exiting. Casey walked to her former spot at the table and then turned to Nancy, who was now a foot away from the conference room exit.
    “Oh, Nancy.” Casey fiddled