Student accounts spammed with pornography

The Northshore School District is investigating after inappropriate emails were sent to thousands of students.

The spam emails contained links to pornography and were sent to Gmail accounts belonging to all secondary students.  The Northshore School District has 21,000 students, and about half of them got the questionable emails.

"I just think it's terrible somebody's going to do this. That's just disgraceful to put that stuff on a student's email. That's just not right," said Michael Fletcher, a student at Woodinville High School. He told KIRO 7 the email shutdown kept him from working on a project Monday.

District officials shut down access to student accounts so they can eliminate the inappropriate content.

The district is investigating how the student emails were compromised. After the students were spammed with pornography, it appeared someone started to create fake email addresses and then used those accounts to spam all secondary students. The district shut down all access Saturday night.

Erick Freligh has a daughter who is a senior at Woodinville High School. They think they figured out how someone got access to student email addresses.

"She could see tracing it back to an email received earlier in the week that someone had exposed the group distribution email addresses for Northshore students, high school and junior high," said Freligh.

He said the district recently sent out an email about the last day of school. He said the distribution list was public; it is usually hidden. Each school has one email address that distributes to every student in that school. He thinks that's what opened up student email accounts to spam but is eager to see what the district determines.

The district told KIRO 7 it was still investigating the email incident on Monday evening.  They are working to remove the inappropriate email from student accounts.  While email is not expected to be restored until later this week, the district says students can access the Google Drive.

Cox Media Group