Education chiefs have pulled the plugs on school computers as cyber terrorists target websites.
The sites of at least 15 schools and school groups have been attacked since the beginning of the year, reports Correio da Manhã newspaper. In some of the attacks, hackers leave religious messages with allusions to Allah, in others they sign themselves off as the Iraq Cyber Army.
One of the schools – the José Régio Secondary School in Vila do Conde – had a number of sections of its website changed by a group calling itself Saudi Arabia Hackers.
Education chiefs consider the problem “motivated by access to social media networks”, thus the decision on Friday last week to block school computers from Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
Accepting the Ministry of Education-led move, Filinto Lima – vice president of the national association of school directors – told CM: “Generally, social networks are not important to central subjects.” But IT teachers contend otherwise. “We have a part of our 8th Year curriculum dedicated to social networks,” explained António Ramos. “How can we teach pupils how to protect their data without showing them what a social network is?”
Ramos added that older pupils will not be affected by the embargo as they “know programmes that unblock social networks”.
Meantime, the targeted pages have all been relatively easy to fix, reports CM.
