Google phishing scam targets Valley K-12 students’ emails

Valley students receive phishing scam emails disguised with teacher’s contact information.

“It looked like a normal email,” 11-year-old Palm Desert Charter Middle School student Carolyn said.

Desert Sands Unified School District said students opened their inbox to find an email claiming to be from someone they knew asking them to open a Google Doc.

“There was this email sent out by teachers but it wasn’t really the teachers. It said to and it said ‘hhhhh,'” Carolyn said.

In one case, a ninth-grade student’s parent was targeted through the same method. The email supposedly coming from her son’s seventh grade teacher.

“It stated that he wanted me to join Google Docs which I thought was very bizarre. I opened it up and then I realized something is kind of fishy. I thought, you know, maybe I shouldn’t open this up. It just seems so strange and then immediately I started receiving emails from the district,” parent Sandi Coleman said.

Google officials said the emails sent a link to a fake app posing as Google Docs and when people accepted the permissions — the phishing scam gained access to the e-mail account and then sent out emails to the entire contact list.
The district caught the surge of emails and began sending some of their own, warning account holders to not open the e-mails but to delete them.

“Google let us know that there was a nationwide very advanced phishing campaign that had been started within Google and they were addressing it and dealing with it in different waves put in security measures shutting it down so users weren’t even able to open anything contained in the email,” Desert Sands Unified School District Chief Innovative Officer Kelly May-Vollmar said.

Google said one way to tell if an email is part of the phishing scam is to check the email address.
If it comes from this email address, “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmailinator.com”, it’s better to delete it.

“The intent of it appears to be to access individuals email contact lists,” May-Vollmar said.

School District officials said security measures were put in place within hours, blocking email accounts from accessing anything contained in a phishing email.