Last week, a cyber attack on the Edinburgh Council caused revision disruption to thousands of pupils amid a high time for exam season. The stakes were high as the hackers tried to steal the details of at least 2,500 school pupils. The attack was reported to be a spear phishing attempt, which was timely detected by the vigilant staff.
Although disaster was averted, the breach highlights just how vulnerable schools and local authorities remain to these cyber threats. Here’s what happened, why it matters, and how your organisation can protect itself.
Table of contents
- Cyber attack on Edinburgh council: a spear phishing attempt
- What is spear phishing and how to spot one?
- How can the public-sector protect itself against spear phishing?
- Final thoughts
Cyber attack on Edinburgh council: a spear phishing attempt
On 7 May 2025, Edinburgh Council’s IT team detected a targeted spear phishing aimed at education staff. The emails appeared genuine, structured like typical meeting invites and tailored to internal recipients.
Something about the emails made staff uneasy. Alerted, the IT team quickly recognised the messages as attempts at “spear phishing”, a sophisticated hacking technique.
Although the attack was intercepted before any known data breach occurred, precautionary measures included forcing thousands of pupils to reset passwords by returning to school in person. Many of those affected were on study leave, making the disruption especially poorly timed.
The incident highlights how even unsuccessful cyber attacks can have real operational and educational consequences.
What is spear phishing and how to spot one?
A standard phishing email looks as if it comes from a reputable sender, for instance, a company offering a promotion. But it is a fake and contains links to malware.
With spear phishing, the hacker doesn’t just try to make the email or messages look reputable. They try to make it look like it comes from someone you know and trust.
A spear phishing email might appear to come from a friend or colleague. The text might contain references to things they would know about you.
Unlike many other hacking tools, spear phishing messages target your people in the first instance, using human failings as the stepping stone to compromise your systems.
A typical spear phishing email (or SMS, or chat message):
- Appears to come from a trusted sender (e.g. colleague, executive)
- Includes personalised details to build credibility
- Creates urgency with implied negative consequences
- Contains a malicious link or attachment
Imagine an attacker sends this to a school office administrator:
This message plays on real fears, uses formal language, and introduces urgency. If your team isn’t trained to spot it, they might click without thinking, giving attackers a foothold into your network.
How can the public-sector protect itself against spear phishing?
That’s why it’s important to make sure your team is well trained in end-user cyber security. This is particularly true in schools and public-sector organisations handling highly sensitive personal data.
There are ways to spot spear phishing emails by analysing the sender information, the text of the email and more. Your colleagues need to know them.
But that’s only part of what you need to do to protect your organisation against spear phishing. To properly harden your defences against this type of attack, you should:
- Build a layered security architecture: implement the full range of technical security measures, from email security, through DNS filtering to multi-factor authentication (MFA) required to prevent unauthorised access attempts.
- Have state-of-the-art incident detection: don’t rely solely on human detection. Your security systems should be able to detect spear phishing attempts, using a range of criteria, and warn users and IT admins.
- Build resilience into your operations: you need robust, tested incident-response strategies, a rapid-recovery plan and the tools and procedures you need to lock-down, rebuild and minimise damage, fast.
While this may seem daunting, it's necessary. Working with a partner with experience in IT support for schools - one that understands the specific challenges faced by schools and public-sector bodies, can help you put the right measures in place with confidence.
Final thoughts
As the Edinburgh Council incident showed, even a foiled spear phishing attempt can cause disruption. A successful spear phishing attack, leading to a data breach, at a school, local council or other public-sector body, would be many times more damaging.
That’s why it’s important to audit your technologies, processes and people. Once you’ve identified any security gaps, you can take steps to improve them.
Texaport is one of the leading providers of IT support Edinburgh. Our experts can help you train your staff and harden your IT systems to protect against spear phishing and other threats.
Contact us today to find out about how you can proactively protect your systems.
