The San Diego Unified School District said they have alerted employees and families to an incident involving the security of their personal data on the district ’s information systems . According to the district they have reason to believe some employee and student personal data may have been compromised through the access or use by an unauthorized individual . Roughly 50 staff members whose accounts were compromised had the security on their accounts reset immediately upon discovery . Families of students whose data may have been accessed have been contacted by the district . The breach is believed to date back to January 2018 and could impact as many as 500,000 students who were enrolled in the district between the 2008 - 09 and 2018 - 19 school years , according to district officials . SDUSD Information Technology staff discovered an unauthorized user was gathering network access log - in information from staff and using that information to log into the district ’s network services , including the district student database . This happened through “ phishing , ” a scam technique where a person creates phony emails that appear to be from a legitimate source and contain harmful links . Unfortunately , this type of scam has become widespread throughout the world . ;