Dear parents/carers,

It has been brought to our attention by a parent from one of our Trust schools that a suspicious looking email, seemingly sent by members of staff within the Trust, has been issued. The emails have a ‘zip file’ attachment and password to use to open it, however, this is not a legitimate email so please do not click on the attachment.

While a thorough investigation is still being carried out by our IT team, we can confirm that this is part of a wider cyber security issue which highly likely originated from outside of NCEAT, but is now having a direct impact on our own communications systems.

We have increased our internal online security as far as possible and are working with providers to ensure that as many of these potentially harmful emails are ‘filtered out’ of our network, however, if you do receive any suspicious looking emails, claiming to be from Duke’s, please do not click on any links or attachments and mark the email as ‘spam’.

To help you to identify a potential scam, please see some guidance below:

• The “sent by” address will either be a jumble of random letters and numbers or have an unusual domain (not .com or .co.uk)
• The email will contain links to click to ‘confirm your details’ or ‘make a payment’
• The email may have an attachment which looks strange or unsafe to open
• The email may give you a limited time to reply
• There might be spelling mistakes, bad grammar and sentences which don’t quite make sense
• If the email contains any logos or images, these may appear ‘pixelated’ or blurry
• If requesting money, the amount will usually be quite specific, not rounded up to the nearest pound/pence to try and make it seem legitimate, eg £692.88 instead of £700,00.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. We are working as quickly as we can to resolve the issue. If anyone has any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to get in touch.