NRL star Jarryd Hayne has been sorely embarrassed in front of a hall of teen students when pornographic images that appeared to be from his mobile phone were beamed accidentally on to a huge screen.

The Gold Coast Titans player was taking part in a cyber awareness seminar at Robina High School on the Gold Coast, when a cyber-safety expert took Haynes’ phone to show students the images Hayne had been viewing recently.

But the students got the shock of their lives when pornographic images suddenly flashed up on the big screen.

Fairfax Media reported the images “included lewd acts and a topless woman”.

Hayne told AAP the incident was “awkward”.

“I shut my phone straight away so that way I was logged off. Wow.”

Hayne was attending the event in an exercise on behalf of Norton Security to educate around 200 teenagers — some as young as 13 — about the ease with which smart technology can be hacked when the incident took place.

Norton Security’s Paul Savvides confirmed the images were not from Hayne’s phone.

“During our wi-fi demo we had an open network that was available for anyone to connect to and someone had connected to the network and browsed to a site where the images were displayed,” Mr Savvides said.

“I’ve just checked and the device that connected that did that was not Jarryd’s phone.

“We do this demo in many scenarios and haven’t had this happen before, so it is unfortunate.

“It’s unfortunate but all I can say is it definitely was not Jarryd’s device.”

The Gold Coast Titans were also keen to water down a potential controversy, issuing a statement saying the content had been traced to a Samsung device, pointing out that Hayne owned an iPhone.

Seven News reporter Amanda Abate was covering the event and tweeted the embarrassing blunder, which has taken on a life of its own on social media.

Jarryd Hayne says porn images weren't from his phone, after they were shown to school kids during a cyber seminar pic.twitter.com/NtoRchkrVm

— Amanda Abate (@AmandaAbate) November 7, 2016

Nonetheless, the incident provided fertile ground for social media users, who leapt in to the controversial code-hopper.

"Jarryd Hayne in school porn gaffe" – never a dull moment in the rugby league off-season or in Hayne's life, for that matter. #NRL

— John Dean (@JohnDean_) November 7, 2016

Jarryd Hayne has literally shown porn to children. Must be November.

— Rudi Edsall (@RudiEdsall) November 7, 2016

https://twitter.com/CommanderPanic/status/795465490722230272

The school principal, Julie Warwick, told The New Daily it was “a very unfortunate incident” and apologised to the students and their families, as has Norton Security.

Ms Warwick also said Norton had advised that the images had come from neither Hayne’s phone, nor from any of the children’s.