Was Canvas hacked? What we know as issues reported at schools across U.S.

Around 2:50 p.m., reports of issues with Canvas, a learning management system used by roughly 40% of higher education institutions in North America, began popping up on Down Detector. By 3:35 p.m., over 8,500 reports had been made by users.

By 5 p.m., Instructure, which owns Canvas, said the software was “fully operational” and no “ongoing unauthorized activity” could be seen by the company at that point.

“As a precaution, we recommend customers follow security best practices, including enforcing MFA on privileged accounts, reviewing admin access, and rotating API tokens or keys where applicable. This will be our final update via this status page for this incident. We will continue to provide updates as appropriate through other channels and are now communicating directly with impacted customers to provide organization-specific information and support,” Instructure said in an update on their status tracking website.

The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Instructure, the company behind the learning management system Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment or questions about whether the system was taken down as a precaution or because the hackers knocked it offline.

The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.

Screen shots he provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing.

A student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said the issues with the software come at a highly stressful time: the day before finals start.

Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Instructure has not posted about the attack on its social media. Its Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more.

Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents.

“This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident,” the University of Iowa’s director of information technology wrote in announcing that the school’s online system was down. “Hopefully we will have a resolution soon.”

Virginia Tech acknowledged in a notice to students that the administration was aware of the effect on final exams and other end-of-semester activities.

“Additional guidance will be shared soon via email and posted on the university status page,” the school wrote.

The student newspaper at Harvard reported that the system was down there, too. And public school districts also sought to reassure parents, with officials in Spokane, Washington, writing that they aren’t “aware of any sensitive data contained in this breach.”

Sean Reynolds, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer for Northwestern University, said the school’s IT office was aware of the issue and monitoring it.

“The vendor has confirmed it is aware the site is unavailable, and we can also confirm that other institutions are experiencing a similar impact. While we don’t have an estimated restoration time from the vendor, please know this incident is not impacting other information technology infrastructure at Northwestern,” Reynolds said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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