Canvas Platform Outage Briefly Disrupts Some College Finals During Cyber Incident

A cyberattack caused an outage of the Canvas online platform in the middle of finals period for many colleges, disrupting a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the service. By late Thursday, Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said the platform was available again to most users.

On Friday, Instructure and Canvas no longer appeared on a site where ShinyHunters lists its targets.

Some schools continued to block students and teachers from accessing Canvas while assessing security threats. The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the Canvas breach, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft.

U.S. And the United Kingdom. The group has been linked to other large-scale cyberattacks including one on Ticketmaster. ” Earlier this week, ShinyHunters said that nearly 9,000 schools and 275 million individuals’ data could be leaked if schools did not pay the ransom by a deadline of May 6.

The group then extended the ransom deadline, indicating some schools had engaged with them to negotiate. In a statement posted to ShinyHunters’ ransomware site, the group said it would not be commenting on the incident. com reported that schools and universities, rich in personally identifiable information, have become prime targets for criminal hackers in ransomware attacks.

The data breach appeared to involve student ID numbers, email addresses, names and messages on the Canvas platform, Steve Proud, Instructure’s chief information security officer, said in an update shared May 2. Instructure had not found evidence that passwords, dates of birth, government identification or financial information were compromised.