The Sooke School District is warning parents about a privacy invasion after an employee’s email was recently hacked.
“It has been discovered that the email account of a staff member was compromised by someone outside of the district and used to email out a spam informational link to other staff. Approximately 15 other staff members clicked on the link, thereby exposing their email accounts and email contents to the hacker(s),” said Jim Cambridge in an email to certain parents in the school district.
The warning email was only directed to approximately 1300 families in the district, who were potentially affected.
Cambridge said the technology department deactivated all emails addresses that were affected, but the contents of the emails could have been compromised, meaning some emails from students in the district could be visible to someone outside SD62.
The school district has also notified the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of the privacy breach.
“We sincerely apologize for this error. We will be looking at ways at the district level that would help to avoid an error like this from happening again,” said Cambridge.
Guardians who received the warning email are welcome to bring their concerns to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner by calling 250-387-5629.
For any further questions, please contact the SD62 secretary-treasurer, Harold Cull at hcull@sd62.bc.ca.