PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — Parents across the state of Florida are reporting incidents of hacking during their children's virtual classroom sessions.
A Palm Beach County mother who did not want to reveal her name said she’s seen situations where pornographic videos have popped up during her child’s digital learning lesson.
"It happened so quickly. I don’t think the students were, they more attending to the inappropriate video then who had posted it or where it came from," said the parent, who has a middle schooler and high schooler in the School District of Palm Beach County.
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The parent has seen the recent news of a hack attack on a Zoom classroom lesson in Orange County, where police said a man exposed himself during the lesson.
The Palm Beach County mom believes that in her case, since the school district is using Google Classroom, there’s a possibility that students are sharing their sign-in links.
"The teacher sends a link, here join this class. So either they’re utilizing hacking to get into it, or the kids in the class are sharing that link with other people," the mother said.
Palm Beach County School District Police Chief Frank Kitzerow said it's all of the above.
"Technology department is pretty sharp group of people and we’re going to use all our resources at our disposal to try to track these people down," said Chief Kitzerow.
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Deputy Superintendent of Schools Keith Oswald said students who are sharing those unique codes with others will face consequences.
"We're actually working with Google right now to put in additional security elements and were going to roll those out to teachers next week," said Oswald.
The parent said she reached out to the district and was impressed with how quickly officials responded and assured her that they were working with the platforms being used to fix the problems.
The parent also said she's aware that teachers are recording their classroom sessions to show school administrators what's happening.
The school district said it's working on stricter security options like requiring the approval of participants before joining the virtual classroom.
