Cyberattack That Disrupted Schools, Finals Ends

A digital backbone of American education was back online Friday, a day after crashing and taking finals week went with it. Canvas—the platform used by more than 8,000 schools and 30 million users worldwide—went down in an apparent ransomware attack, knocking students offline just as exams and deadlines peaked, reports CNN. The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the attack, per CBS News, after a ransom note threatening a data release appeared on Canvas portals at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Georgetown, and Rutgers, as well as at K-12 districts in at least four states. Canvas' parent company, Instructure, said Friday most users are again able to use the system.

By Thursday evening, a message on Instructure's site noted that Canvas was back for "most users," reports the New York Times. The outage caused chaos at schools, which delayed exams and scrambled to email materials directly to students. Teachers said they were looking for workarounds to help students turn in assignments and prepare for exams. Elizabeth Polo was in a creative writing class at the University of Maryland on Thursday afternoon when a classmate shouted, "Canvas got hacked," per the AP. "Our whole class just like was like freaking out about it," said Polo, a junior. "Our poor professor was trying to get everyone to calm down but it was just kind of chaos."

ShinyHunters, previously linked to the Ticketmaster hack and other major data thefts, has been tied by US authorities to the sale of stolen data from more than 60 companies, per CBS, underscoring how reliant classrooms have become on a single cloud platform. A cybsersecurity threat analyst describes the group as "a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the US and the United Kingdom," per the AP. Meanwhile, Malwarebytes has advice for parents whose kids were affected by the latest breach.

Teachers were given more time to submit final grades, too; at East Carolina University, the new deadline is 8am May 13, per WCTI. At Wayne State in Detroit, a computer science professor was finalizing 94 students' grades when Canvas crashed, per the AP. If he couldn't recover the semester's assignments, which make up half of the final grade, Rhongho Jang said he'd give everyone full credit. "I didn't want to penalize them," he said. "We cannot judge based on the data we don't have."