Opening his laptop, sophomore McCrae Flickinger checks his school email only to find his inbox flooded with messages. This time, instead of his email containing messages from BLEND or from his friends, it’s emails asking for his personal information. Fake companies pretending to be legitimate organizations like the United Postal Service enter Flickinger’s email attempting to trick him into giving away his identity. Flickinger, however, doesn’t fall for the trap and deletes the emails.

This year, AISD students and teachers are getting greater numbers of spam emails in their school inbox. October was Cybersecurity Awareness month and AISD has numerous resources on their website designed to inform students and families how to be safe online. From online games to resources for parents to help advise their kids on using online resources, AISD is prepared in helping every person within the AISD community stay safe online.

“I receive spam emails pretty often, maybe once every two days,” Flickinger said. “I usually don’t even open them and I delete them because they usually say potentially spam but if I do, it normally asks me about a lost UPS package or something like that.”

According to AISD, a person’s email is the most dangerous source of IT breaches. To help inform district members, AISD has prepared several tips to help people be aware of spam emails. People should be aware of suspicious links and emails, not automatically reply to emails that claim to be urgent and remember that links from the internet end in .com, not hacker.com. Additionally, AISD will never ask for a student or teacher’s personal information via email.

“You should look for a weird prefix, there’s a standard format to all of AISD’s emails,” librarian Tara Walker-Leon said. “It’s your first name, your last name @austinisd.org. The spam emails could also come from a school gmail account or they might not have the same uniform format before the @ sign. Another thing you could look for is things in the email that are misspelled. A big thing is if they ever ask you for your private information, then they are trying to get you to give personal information to steal your identity.”

According to the Austin Journal, the recent attacks have involved hackers pretending to be an AISD account to send fake emails. These emails ask students for personal information such as a student’s name or personal email address and try to trick students by asking them to do time sensitive tasks such as filling out a job application or resetting a password. These emails put students’ identity and personal information at risk, so students should ignore and report them.

“They get in somehow and they get in your email and then from that entry point they are able to access maybe your birth date, ” Walker-Leon said. “They take that information and they sell it to the dark web. If they can match all of your information shared online, then they can steal your identity and do all kinds of things.”

As stated in an article by the Guardian Digital, clicking an embedded malicious link can lead to a leak of private information and cause data loss. According to the National Cyber Security Center, most cyber breaches are not a result of complex and sophisticated attacks, the vast majority of attacks are from well-known techniques such as phishing. Phishing allows hackers to piece together parts of someone’s identity and sell online, putting private information in the public view. 

“The whole idea behind phishing is to get your information and from what I understand is they try to get young kids,” Walker-Leon said. “Hackers that steal people’s identities love to steal young people’s identities, so by the time you turn 18, you won’t even know someone stole your identity.”

According to HOXHUNT, a platform that trains employees to recognize and report security threats, particularly phishing attacks,  the total volume of phishing attacks had increased by 49% since the creation of ChatGPT in 2022. Additionally, 65% of attacks target organizations, such as schools or entire districts and 35% target individuals. The 2024 FBI internet report says that most phishing complaints came from California, Florida, and Texas, with the report stating that people over the age of 60 had the biggest losses of $5 billion dollars.

“People don’t think before they start clicking links,” senior Theresa Linsalata said. “I know someone who fell for one and she didn’t realize it was a scam until she read the email again.”

Ask a teacher if an email looks suspicious and report any phishing emails and report them to the AISD police if any information was shared. Students can also report any cybersecurity concerns to the AISD directly through the district website. Teachers can also help verify an email. 

“I hope students that receive spam emails don’t interact with them because digital safety is really important,” Flickinger said. “There are so many ways to tell when an email is just trying to steal someone’s information.”