Anyone who receives an unexpected email from School District 70 is urged not to click on the attachment and to immediately change their password.
Emails from SD70 addresses began circulating throughout the West Coast Monday morning with a malicious word document attached.
Ucluelet resident Pieter Timmermans received the email, and told the Westerly News it had been sent to him from an SD70 email address that once belonged to his sister, who is no longer with the school district.
“It looked fishy from the get-go, but some people aren’t that savvy. I’m the least savvy, but I was cautious enough not to click on it,” he said. “A lot of parents could get sucked into this thing.”
The school district’s Director of Learning Jack Hitchings told the Westerly News that SD70 is aware of the emails and has reached out to its service provider for assistance.
“Right now, we’re just trying to monitor the traffic and make sure that if anything suspicious is circulating, that we’re dealing with it as quickly as possible,” Hitchings said. “We’re seeing activity from Russia, from Romania, from various places, so it’s probably some sort of a bot…There’s someone out there making some nasty stuff and we just happened to get caught up in it.”
He said anyone who receives the email should immediately change their password.
“In some cases, it just takes one account to be compromised and then all of a sudden you can get a flood of email going through. So, we’re trying to find out exactly what the details are right now. The only thing that we can suggest for anybody right now, is change their password,” he said.
“Because this is so widespread and all kinds of people are getting this email, my suggestion is just change your password and make it complex. One of the things that we’re finding is some of the accounts that have been compromised had a very simple password that could have easily been guessed, so we think that might be one way that somebody got into the account.”
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