CodeHS Cybersecurity Insider: New Courses, Cyber Range, Cybersecurity News, and More!

Aug 17, 2026•3 min read

🎓 Back to School Course Spotlights

Start the semester with one of our three cybersecurity courses. Course links and syllabi are below, along with a spotlight lesson or project for each.

AP Cybersecurity

The College Board's AP Cybersecurity course launches nationally this school year as part of AP Career Kickstart, and CodeHS has a fully aligned course ready to go. The yearlong course covers threats, vulnerabilities, risk, and defense in depth. No prior CS experience needed.

Lesson highlight: "AI Has Entered the Chat" (Unit 1). Students explore how adversaries use AI for social engineering and reconnaissance, then flip the perspective to spot deepfakes and build a personal AI safety plan.

View the course → View the syllabus →

Fundamentals of Cybersecurity

Project highlight: Create an Escape Room. In the Cryptography module, students design and build their own escape room, encoding clues with ciphers that are solvable but not trivial. Students who finish can prep for the CodeHS Cybersecurity Level 1 Certification.

View the course → View the syllabus →

Advanced Cybersecurity

Project highlight: Steganography. Students build their own encryption algorithm to hide a message inside an image, then swap images with a partner and try to recover each other's hidden messages. Pairs well with the Advanced Cryptography module right before it.

View the course → View the syllabus →

🎒 Activity: One Password, Many Doors

New year, new logins. Students are setting up accounts for the LMS, the lunch portal, and club sign-ups, usually with a password they've used before. That habit is exactly what attackers count on with credential stuffing: stolen username/password pairs run automatically against hundreds of other sites.

Scenario 1: Maya uses one password for her school email, a food delivery app, and a game forum from 6th grade. The forum gets breached. Which accounts are at risk, and in what order would an attacker try them?

Scenario 2: A classmate says, "It doesn't matter if someone gets into my pizza app." Have students list what a food app actually stores: saved card, address, birthday, gift card balance. Is it really low value?

Back to school tip: Have students pick their three most important accounts and give each one a unique password before the first unit test. Five minutes, highest-value thing they'll do all semester.

🗞️ Cybersecurity in the News

Chick-fil-A loyalty accounts hijacked. Chick-fil-A was never hacked. In July 2026, Chick-fil-A notified customers that unauthorized parties accessed Chick-fil-A One loyalty accounts during an automated attack. The company's own systems were never breached. Attackers logged in through the front door using credentials stolen from other, unrelated companies.

The vulnerability here wasn't a firewall or a server. It was password reuse.

Discuss: Chick-fil-A says its systems were never compromised. Is the company still responsible? What would have stopped this attack on an individual account, even with a stolen password?

Read more →

🔥 Cybersecurity Challenge

Can your students decode the message below? Every letter has been swapped for a different one.

MVEVI IVFHV KZHHDLIWH

Hint: this cipher mirrors the alphabet.

Last issue's answer: the Morse code message decoded to "THINK BEFORE YOU CLICK."

📅 Free PD: Your First Month Teaching AP Cybersecurity

Sep 16, 2026
3:30 – 4:30pm CT · Virtual

Just launched AP Cybersecurity or planning to this fall? This live session walks through what to expect in your first month, common early hurdles, and where to lean on CodeHS support.

💻 New: Cyber Range Is Here

Students practice real-world cybersecurity skills in a secure Linux environment.

Cyber Range is now live: an interactive lab environment built to pair with AP Cybersecurity, Fundamentals, and Advanced Cybersecurity. It's an add-on to the free curriculum.

✅ Back to School Checklist

Ready for a smooth start to the school year? Walk through our 5-step checklist to easily set up your sections, explore new courses, and get your CodeHS classroom ready to go.

👥 CodeHS Teaching Cohorts

CodeHS is offering professional learning cohorts for the 2026-27 school year, supporting educators with guided learning, classroom strategies, and a collaborative community.

There's still time to join us! Register before our next round of live sessions, the week of September 14th.

🎉 Set Up Hands-On Cyber Labs Faster With CodeHS Pro

Use the new Student Groups tool to organize students for Cyber Range activities, plus Fast Grade and real-time progress tracking built for cybersecurity classrooms.