Iris Wallace
Junior Editor
A number of Webster Groves High School students and staff had their emails hacked by an unknown phisher. Many were fooled by the phisher when they were sent a fake Google document via email. When they clicked on the email, they were prompted to sign in to their accounts, unknowingly giving their information to the hacker.
Sophomore Ava Olsen was a victim of the hacking. After logging into her email account, the phisher deleted her entire email, and her computer was temporarily unusable with no account to do work on. Olsen said that this experience “really set me back” because she could not do any digital schoolwork. Olsen also said that during the process of getting a new account, she had to get a new email password that was different from her lunch PIN.
Olsen noted that when she got her new email address, she somehow was able to see all of the emails that the hacker had sent out to others. She couldn’t see any emails that were being sent to her from teachers because the phisher had changed the settings on her account to make all new emails go straight to the trash.
After the problems were fixed with Olsen’s account, she said that even though this experience took a toll on her grades and time, Olsen said she “got a great story out of it.”
The tech department said it learned about this problem from system alerts and reports, and immediately had to weed out the problem. The tech department had to identify compromised or suspected accounts, secure them, reset them, and remove any “malicious” or false information they were containing.
To prevent hacking or phishing, Director of Technology Zach Klestinske said it’s important to pay close attention to the content of all your emails. A lot of times, hackers say things like, “Your account will be closed today,” or “I need this ASAP,” to lure people in. Email hackers also usually have misspelled names, or the @ symbol is in the middle of the email address instead of at the beginning. To further prevent your email from being hacked, Klestinske said that you should never log into your email account after clicking on a link from an email. Instead, go to the site directly and log in there. If you click on an email that has suspicious or invalid information, you should report it immediately so that it doesn’t get to anyone else.
