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Police leave Aberfoyle Park High School as students return to class following security threat. Twitter/7 News Adelaide

Hundreds of South Australian students had to be evacuated on Friday after schools in Adelaide received phone threats that could be linked to hoax bomb calls made to over 30 schools across Australia this week.

Since last Friday, dozens of primary and high schools interstate, including New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT and Queensland, have received automated phone calls with threats of violence - some for consecutive days.

The calls prompted evacuations and lock-downs in the targeted schools.

Banksia Park International High School is one of several Adelaide schools to receive the call on Friday. Principal Lyndall Bain told The Advertiser that the voice from the call they received had belonged to a man who “gave the message about a bomb while there was someone else talking in the background”.

“It’s just so sad they would choose to target a school where children are trying to learn about the world and should be allowed to feel they are in a safe environment,” Bain added.


At least within Victoria, the calls made to schools have also been automated, although one had an American accent, Police Commissioner Chief Graham Ashton said.

Even though the electronic voice calls, which police believe are “designed to cause disruption and attract media attention,” have proven to be hoaxes, authorities are saying all threats would be taken seriously.

"It may be that a particular call that might come in that is not a hoax," Chief Commissioner Ashton said on Tuesday.

The purpose and source of the threats remain unknown, but authorities believe the threats could have originated from overseas, considering there is no “credible evidence they could be carried out here”.

Some theories about who the ‘masterminds’ are include sophisticated hackers, and users of the dark web – Internet content that isn’t indexed by search engines and usually encrypted, constituting small, peer-to-peer networks.

There is, however, no suspected link to the Islamic State – and chief executive of Intelligent Risks Neil Fergus believes the terrorist organisation would not “waste their resources” on such threats.

"It's well within their capabilities but it's hard to see what they would obtain out of it other than putting more pressure on themselves to move on to the black web," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

The wave of hoax bomb calls in Australia follow on from similar threatening messages sent to schools in England, the US, France, Japan and even Guam, although there have been no confirmed links between the incidences.

Evacuation Squad claims responsibility

One Russian hacker group has stepped forward to claim responsibility for Monday’s threats, which targeted nine schools in NSW.

Evacuation Squad, a pro-Putin cyber group, told Mashable Australia earlier this week that the group had made the threats to Australian schools on Monday because they were “funny”.

The group’s spokesman, who goes by the name Viktor Olyavich, added that Europe would be next.

“We are preparing to do schools across Europe as we speak. We don’t worry about the consequences, because our main threat-makers are based in Russia and Iran,” Olyavich said.

“We are doing so many at once due to a stolen VOIP account that has a trove of calling credit.”

The group has also claimed responsibility for threats made to schools in the UK and US.

Multiple media reports note that the cyber group has in the past offered to call in bomb threats to schools in exchange for payment. According to News Corp, one of the tweets from the group’s now-deleted “Evacuators 2K16” Twitter account (@Ev4cuati0nSquad) had said:

“Want to get out of school for a day? Want to divert the police away from a crime you’re going to commit? Email us.”

However, according to Fairfax Media on Thursday, a member of the Evacuation Squad told the newspaper that no Australian students had contacted them, and that any local attacks were probably the work of “copycats”.

Fairfax had reached out to the group via email, and reportedly spoke to a Viktor Olyavich – the same name used to contact Mashable Australia.

Police have not been able to establish whether the Evacuation Squad carried out any of the attacks.