Education department’s e-mail hacked, porn sent to schools

HOSHIARPUR - In an incident that left school teachers in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur district red-faced, the official e-mail address of the education office here was hacked Thursday and pornographic content was circulated to all the 400 government schools in the district.

“We were using this e-mail address to send notices and important information to the schools in Hoshiarpur. This is a case of cyber attack as someone has sent pornographic material to all schools after hacking this e-mail address,” Sukhwinder Kaur, deputy district education officer (DEO), Hoshiarpur, told IANS.

Following the incident, the DEO lodged a police complaint.

“It was really embarrassing as majority of the teachers in the schools computer departments are females. Such things are not tolerable and we are all shocked over this incident. On getting this information, we immediately issued directions to schools not to open the mails sent from this address, Kaur said.

Sources say the hacker sent around 15 to 20 vulgar mails to each school.

The teachers have demanded strict action against the hacker.

We check our mails at around 10 a.m. on all working days. Normally, we get important messages through this address. Today, we were surprised. We cannot explain the level of discomfiture in words. We want strict punishment for the culprit, a female computer teacher said.

Meanwhile, police have started investigating.

We are taking this issue very seriously and our investigation is on. We are taking the help of IT experts and our cyber cell officials to catch the culprit. We are hopeful of nabbing him at the earliest, said District Police Chief Rakesh Aggarwal.

Hoshiarpur is around 120 km from state capital Chandigarh.