Not long after nine o’clock on Thursday morning, and again this Friday, in the middle of the second hour of class, the explanations disappeared … from the digital blackboards of different schools and institutes across Andalucía.
Where a few seconds before there were equations, analysis and maps, a song began to play: “Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve, / debí darte más besos y abrazos las veces que pude” (I should have taken more pictures of when I had you, / I should have given you more kisses and hugs as many times as I could).
Bad Bunny’s hit song became the unexpected soundtrack in hundreds of Andalusian classrooms, many of them in Malaga, to the confusion of the teachers and the laughter of the students.
The scene was repeated at the same time in classrooms hundreds of kilometres apart: a reggaeton song interrupting the class, teachers looking around without understanding what was happening and screens that had stopped responding.
“At first we thought it was a student hacking into the board,” says one teacher. The reaction was immediate. “I told them: ‘If I catch whoever it was, I’ll expel them’.” The suspicion, however, was short-lived. He only had to talk to other classmates to realise that it was not a problem in his class. Not even the school’s.
The regional ministry of education is already investigating the facts to find out what went wrong.
Messages began flying back and forth rapidly across the teachers’ WhatsApp groups. “Is this happening to you too?” “It’s not connecting here either.” “We’ve had the same problem.” What at first seemed like an isolated prank began to take on a whole new dimension.
The regional ministry of education is now investigating the cause of the incident to determine what went wrong – whether it was external access to the devices, a system vulnerability or a technical fault of some other nature.
What the teachers interviewed by this newspaper do share is the sense of vulnerability left by this episode, which recurred on Thursday and Friday. “The next thing will be a pornographic image,” said one of them: “They can put anything on there.”
The incident seems to have something of a teenage prank about it because, while the song was playing, the screens displayed a seemingly romantic message: “At Irene’s request.” But several teachers agree that the alleged declaration of love has greater significance than it initially appears.
As the song played, the blackboards projected a seemingly romantic message: “At Irene’s request”
The problem was not only the song playing by the famous Puerto Rican singer, who is touring Spain. For much of the morning, many teachers found it difficult to use the digital whiteboards, which in many cases were inoperative.
“They won’t work”, “they won’t connect” and “it’s the same as yesterday” were some of the most recurrent phrases among the teachers consulted, whose bewilderment is all the greater because, for the moment, there has been no internal or official notification to clarify the incident.
Pending the investigation to determine the origin of this musical episode, the story leaves an image difficult to forget: hundreds of teachers trying to control their classes while a Bad Bunny song was playing on the whiteboard where notes, exercises and presentations are usually shown.
Whether the alleged hacker intended to play a prank, declare their love for the now famous Irene or simply prove that they could do it is still unknown. What they have achieved to the rhythm of reggaeton has been something much more disturbing: interrupting the mornings of schools throughout Andalucía and exposing the vulnerability of their systems at the same time.
The affected screens are part of the regional government’s interactive digital classrooms programme
The song was not played in its entirety, barely thirty seconds. But it was enough to set off all the alarm bells. The affected screens are part of the interactive digital classrooms programme of the regional government of Andalucía and, in many schools, use Smart Board MX Series models, devices that can be managed remotely using tools such as Smart Remote Management, a platform designed to control and configure the equipment from a central location.
Personal documents
According to consulted sources, these interactive whiteboards can be used either connected to a classroom computer or independently via a built-in Android system with access to digital applications and services commonly used in schools.
In practice, many teachers work daily with profiles that remain logged in on the screens themselves to speed up access to materials, documents and applications, with sessions that often remain open for long periods of time to avoid having to enter passwords constantly.
This is another of the concerns raised by teachers following this incident, a concern that in this case relates to the information circulating through these tools. Tutorials, academic reports, communication with families, class materials, assessments, and internal or even personal documents form part of this digital ecosystem used on a daily basis. Although there is currently no evidence that unauthorised access to this data has taken place, several teachers admit that they have logged out of their sessions on the advice of their school management until the matter is clarified.
If it is confirmed that someone gained unauthorised access to the infrastructure managing the digital whiteboards, the incident could constitute the offence of unlawful access to computer systems under the criminal code, punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment.
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