MASON, Ohio — If you get an email that appears to be from Mason City Schools asking you to verify your email address through Dropbox.com, hit delete!
Tracey Carson, spokeswoman for Mason City Schools, said the school district is warning parents that any emails they may have received Wednesday should be viewed skeptically.
“One of our employees received an email from a trusted colleague from Columbus yesterday,” Carson said. “(The) problem is it’s a phishing email.”
Josh Abernathy, founder of On-Call Computers in Monroe, recommended copying and pasting any link included in an email message into a search engine such as Google.com. This way, you can see if it is legitimate and sends you to the genuine website instead of a phishing site designed to trick visitors into entering personal information.
“If it just doesn’t look right, a lot of times it’s not,” Abernathy said. “Once you’ve been hacked, you want to immediately change the password to where you’ve been hacked, and if you have other passwords, you know the same password with other accounts, it’s probably advisable to change those as well.”
Carson said Mason City Schools has removed the phishing emails from its internal system, but reminds parents to delete any suspicious emails without opening them.
WCPO.com is on your side. If you’re hacked:
- Change your password.
- Report the incident to the email site.
- Change your passwords and security questions for other sites.
- Monitor your accounts.