As if the first few weeks of the school year weren’t disruptive enough, teachers, students and school staff across the country have had to deal with a series of bomb scares, forcing them to evacuate.
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But police in Australia have yet to determine whether the cases are linked. Bomb threats were called in to Queensland schools, while Sydney’s Cherrybrook Technology High and Denistone East Primary School were also affected. The Age reports that police are investigating whether some of the calls received in Victoria yesterday could have originated from Nossal High School, a selective school in that state, and whether its telecommunications systems had been hacked.
The threats to the French and British schools last week were claimed by a Twitter account calling itself the Evacuation Squad, with a profile picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So far all calls appear to be hoaxes, but Premier Daniel Andrews says every call was being treated seriously.
Principal Roger Page said the select entry school, located in Berwick, would co-operate with police. No bombs or suspicious objects were found, police said.
The NSW department of education confirmed that the schools were taking precautionary measures and working with authorities after “several schools received threats”, Xinhua news agency reported. “It may be that a particular call that might come in that is not a hoax”.
Professor Sanjay Jha, the director of cybersecurity and privacy at the University of NSW, said that the perpetrators could prove hard for police to track down.
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“It means if people are malicious and have created an account with a false identity and they’re outside Australian jurisdictions, it can be hard to trace where they are or the people behind it. These servers are typically not in a locations where Australian authorities can easily access them”.
