ShinyHunters breached Canvas, leading to downtime during school finals.
Students have faced challenges due to Canvas’s outage amid school finals.
The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for disrupting a prominent education platform twice recently. This breach affected numerous institutions during finals. On April 30, Canvas, a Learning Management System by Instructure, experienced downtime. Instructure later confirmed a data breach involving a “criminal threat actor.”
ShinyHunters allegedly stole data from 275 million users across nearly 9,000 schools. The breach involved usernames, email addresses, student IDs, and private messages, impacting students, teachers, and staff, including minors. No passwords or sensitive data were taken.
Instructure took steps to address the breach, revoking access and restoring Canvas. A week later, ShinyHunters reportedly hacked again, compromising school-specific login pages and defacing them with threats. Demanding negotiations, the group threatened to release stolen data unless a settlement with Instructure was reached.
The second breach led to another Canvas downtime. Instructure removed Free-For-Teacher accounts, identifying a vulnerability tied to support tickets. Despite no data theft, the second incident’s timing was disruptive for schools holding finals.
Google searches for “canvas hacked” and “canvas down” surged by 1,000%. Seton Hall University and other institutions faced challenges, with Bayton University in Texas postponing exams.
Canvas is back online, but ShinyHunters’ deadline to release data looms on May 12.