On May 8, students across America woke up, checked canvas, and were met with a certain message stating that the platform had been hacked by a group of hackers who refer to themselves as the ShinyHunters.
“The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas,” wrote Heather Hollingsworth in the Associated Press.
Canvas is an online learning platform that is used by elementary, middle, high schools, colleges, and even universities across the U.S. The website is used by schools in order to keep track of their students’ grades, assignments, and personal information.
When students were informed about the Canvas hack, some felt joy thinking this just meant no work for the day, while others were met with anxiety realizing that Canvas not only held their grades, but also their personal information. The hackers threaten to leak users personal information including addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, and more.
The Federal Trade Commission’s website states that “online learning platform Canvas’ parent company Instructure was hacked, potentially putting students’ personal information at risk.”
When the site got hacked, the ShinyHunters left a message where they explained that if Instructure, which is the company that owns Canvas, did not pay a ransom of an unknown amount by a certain date, they would begin to sell information of all its users.
“The hack came after the group believed to be behind it warned Instructure in a ransom note to ‘pay or leak,’ saying it had accessed data from millions of users, including students, teachers, and staff,” Hannah Park, Ramishah Maruf, and Emma Tucker wrote in CNN detailing the hack.
This posed a huge threat to both the company who runs Canvas and all of the Canvas users. This is because anybody who got a hold of the personal information like addresses and other private information of Canvas users would be able to use it for things like identity fraud.
Even knowing the severity of the situation, the Canvas company was able to handle the breach in a professional manner and the platform was back and running later in the day on May 8th.
Although Canvas was able to be fixed the same day, the hack still had a major impact on schools who used the platform. The hack occurred in the middle of exam week for high schools and colleges all across the U.S.
As a result of this, many students could not access any of their assignments, and some schools even had to postpone exams to a later date. Many students were also not able to check things like their grades or even their schedules due to the fact that many schools run solely through Canvas.
Even after Canvas was back up and running, many users still questioned if the platform was safe to use; however, Instructure assured users in a recent Q&A that it was still safe to use writing “Yes. Canvas is fully back online and available for use. Our external forensic partner has reviewed the known indicators and found no evidence that the threat actor currently has access to the platform.”
