Address Evolving Threats

• By Dave Baker
• Sep 09, 2024

Event season is well underway, with organizations across industries hosting bustling customer conferences, flagship brand events and exclusive meetups for their top VIPs.

As security leaders’ partner with events teams, and brand leaders ensure the safety of all attendees, there is a major consideration they must plan for: The upcoming election.

Whether your event happens next week or in March 2025, presidential election cycles add to the potential threat landscape, especially when hosting events in state capitals. And evolving threats require an increased focus on proactive risk management instead of reactive defense.

The LVT team recently partnered with a government organization to augment security during its annual summer event, and we experienced firsthand how a robust security strategy can help circumvent any potential concern before it escalates — empowering on-the-ground teams to cover any environment with optimal efficiency.

Let us explore five key takeaways to help bolster your large event security strategy.

Developing Your Security Strategy for Large Events

There are two types of threats event security teams should prepare for:

• Targeted, in which someone looks to exploit any vulnerability available that will help accomplish the goal of their attack. Targeted attacks are premeditated and may involve multiple attackers. There is a greater risk of targeted attacks during election cycles and when event attendees are high profile, including celebrities, government officials, or business leaders.
• Opportunistic, in which an attacker exploits a vulnerability they happen to come across. Opportunistic attacks are not premeditated and are typically less sophisticated than a targeted attack. However, they can amplify the potential damage of attacks overall.

Open environments make it difficult to maintain your team’s security posture inside the venue, so it is critical to think through every potential attack point examining all possible threat scenarios. This allows security teams to identify their key concerns and fill any gaps in the safety plan.

5 Strategies to Bolster Security at Large Conferences and Events
The following strategies can provide the proper mix of prevention, detection, and optimal security response during a large event:

• Introduce necessary friction. Although you do not want to significantly detract from the attendee experience, there should be some friction around access to the area so the security team can best deter, detect and delay a potential incident and properly respond. Security checkpoints are a common way to add friction and concentrate resources. Consider additional ways to introduce friction inside the event venue subtly, including how you can physically separate high-profile speakers or restricted areas from the public.
• Establish communication protocols and decision trees. Every member of your event team needs to know how to respond during an incident. Create dedicated channels reserved solely for security teams to communicate. Ahead of the event, create a crisis scenario plan to prepare team members for every potential situation and empower them with decision trees to assess the best response to threats in the moment.

Perform routine environment checks. As soon as event set-up begins, conduct regular reviews of the perimeter and surrounding areas for any signs of a disturbance. Installing video surveillance solutions can be a crucial way to monitor areas and provide 24/7 coverage. These environment checks should also identify any potential blind spots in your coverage or visual impediments like event stages or booths as they are set up.

Augment physical security with digital solutions. Surveillance solutions can greatly force multiply on-the-ground security workers and optimize their response. Cameras coupled with video management systems and analytics capabilities can help proactively notify teams of a potential incident. These tools are also key for collecting evidence to analyze an incident afterward and learn how to stop something similar from happening in the future.

Factor for cybersecurity. Many events now offer hybrid experiences as the default, blending in-person and digital elements seamlessly. Even entirely in-person events often include mobile apps or other digital channels for attendees to access event resources and connect with other attendees. Physical security teams should align with digital security teams to ensure all digital assets are protected and to establish protocols if a cyber attack is launched on the event.

Staying Ahead of the Evolving Event Threat Landscape
Bolstering your event security gives attendees a sense of safety and security, and helps your team get ahead of any potential incidents.

Debrief after all events to review what worked and what could have been better. Use these insights to gradually adapt your security playbook and be able to respond gracefully in the face of any threat.

This article originally appeared in the September / October 2024 issue of Security Today.