Tuesday Lunchtime

As Tuesday afternoon is free, you consider leaving early and missing lunch. No. Mrs Oversight will probably notice. She’s already on your back about missing assembly. Don’t want another reason for her to get at you.

You grab your lunch and sit in the main hall with Anissa, Abigail and Spencer. This time you wait until Anissa has said grace before starting to eat. Conversation is stilted and mainly centres around the return of Brianna. All three are surprised that Nurse Karlee disturbed your lesson to ask Brianna to visit her.

“Maybe she wanted to see you.” This statement is thrown in halfway through the conversation by a newcomer, Krystal. Her aside makes the other three women shake their heads and come up with denials as she takes her seat beside you. Krystal’s smile tells you that she enjoyed the fact her statement caused such consternation.

“While I’ve got you all here, I just wanted to check you’d all seen my email of this morning?”

Anissa has. You and the other two haven’t.

“Can you read it, please. Especially you two.” She points out you and Abigail. “It’s important. About IT security. We’ve been getting a lot of unusual activity recently, that I’m interpreting as hacking attempts.”

“Someone’s trying to hack the school?”

“That’s my guess. We usually get attempts by the students to hack the school network, but I know what to look for in those cases, and I can normally work out who’s behind it, because they’re normally in my class. But this doesn’t match that behaviour. And it does appear to concentrate on the history department."

"You think one of us?”

“Why would either of you want to hack into the school, you already have access.”

“I changed all my passwords as you suggested,” Abigail states defensively. “And in the way you suggested.”

“Good. We can’t be too careful when it comes to security. Just keep an eye out. Please, all follow the password protocols. Dr Stricture has finally agreed for me to roll out 2 party confirmation, but that will take time. Until then, use passwords that are long, use lowercase, uppercase, numbers, symbols, and are not something others can guess. If you can use a password vault. All the details are in my email.”

She smiles, as if she hadn’t just given you 4 a lecture.