Canvas has been restored to nearly 9,000 schools around the world after hackers disrupted services on the popular online education platform.According to reports by
the New York Times, the Associated Press and other US media, the US company Instructure, which developed the Canvas platform, suffered a“Cyber attack by criminals” on May 1, the attack was claimed by a hacker group called Shining Hunter. “Ransomware real-time tracking platform” 3 released the ransom letter shows that the hacker group said it had access to nearly 9000 schools more than 275 million people’s data. The hacking group said the data could be compromised if the schools fail to pay the ransom by 6 days. It then extended the deadline and suggested that some schools had approached it to try to negotiate. The chief executive of Instructure said the database had been accessed without authorization. Affected data includes user names, e-mail addresses, course names, course selection information, and message content. Core teaching data, including course content, assignment submission records, and account login information, was not affected. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed Monday that it was aware of the outages and advised college students and faculty to remain calm and wait for official guidance from the school. The FBI stressed that“Cyber fraudsters often overstate or lie about their possession of sensitive data in order to extract money from victims”.
According to CNN, Canvas is deeply embedded in the daily teaching of universities around the world, with about 30m active users worldwide. On the Canvas, students can view course materials, submit assignments, look up grades, and take exams. MIT student Alison Parker says professors are busy looking up student e-mail addresses after being unable to use the Canvas announcement function. “The site is an important way for teachers and students to connect outside the classroom. It wasn’t until professors started fumbling for our mailboxes that I realized how deeply we’ve come to rely on it.”
On May 7, a number of universities around the world using the Canvas platform reported problems with the system, Bloomberg said. Later in the day, Instructure said it had restored most of its services, but some schools continued to block students and teachers from accessing the Canvas platform because of security risks. A U.S. student at Columbia University said the outage came at a“Most inopportune time,” as many students, fresh from end-of-term celebrations, headed into intense exam revision periods, some students’ plans for final revision may be affected.
The University of Sydney in Australia is one of the universities that uses the Canvas platform. A special reporter from the Global Times learned that students from the university were still unable to log on to the Canvas platform until the morning of the 8th local time, this situation has continued until later on the 9th. During the outage, students were unable to view any content on the platform, upload assignments or download courseware. Teachers can not access the platform. The University of Sydney issued a notice Monday saying the platform has been fully evaluated and is currently in a secure state, following advice from Australia’s National Cyber Security Office. Joanne Wright, vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, said in an email to students that there was no evidence of any breach of sensitive student or faculty data.
Little is known about the group, which claimed responsibility for hacking into a ticketing platform in 2024 and trying to sell user data on the dark web, CNN said. Google’s cyber security arm said earlier this year that there had been an increase in activities similar to the shining hunters’ previous operations. The group uses sophisticated voice phishing techniques, as well as fake corporate login pages, to steal employee login information and then steal sensitive data from cloud platforms for ransom.
Anthony Dabra, executive director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and deceptive as artificial intelligence advances. He says a new generation of large language models is particularly good at finding vulnerabilities. “The cyber tools we rely on are virtually like Swiss cheese when it comes to the risk of attack,” Anton said