Stephani Cherkaoui, who was a former social studies teacher at the CMIT Academy Middle School in Laurel, Maryland, during the 2017-2018 school year, got an email from her credit monitoring service saying her account was compromised.
“I go online, and I check it out and it says that my name and email address and Social Security number has been found on the dark web and the email associated with it was my Prince George’s County teacher email address,” Cherkaoui said. “There’s nothing I can do. I just sort of have to wait around and hope nobody tries to steal my identity.”
She said she had no idea nor did she receive any notification of a security breach from Prince George’s County public schools.
“Your information is just out there and then you just wait until something happens,” Cherkaoui said. “I’m sure most of the time they’re not catching these cybercriminals that are out there stealing people’s identities and scamming them. So, I just got to sit around and hope for the best.”
When she reached out to school leaders about the issue, they told her in an email obtained by WTOP that her former user account was not one of the 4,500 initially reported to the school system as compromised.
This summer, the school system first revealed its network had fallen victim to a “cyberattack,” affecting about 4,500 user accounts out of a total 180,000. Most of them were staff accounts. The school system said it didn’t appear that student information systems were affected by the data breach.
School leaders released the following statement to WTOP:
“PGCPS is continuing the incident response and recovery process from the Aug. 14, 2023, cyberattack. We have engaged an external cybersecurity firm to conduct a forensic review and analysis of the impacted data set in order to identify the individuals whose information was impacted so that we can notify them directly and offer them credit monitoring,” Prince George’s County Public Schools spokesperson Meghan Gebreselassie. “Following the conclusion of the data analysis, any person determined to be impacted by the data breach will be notified and offered credit monitoring.”
