Dorothy

The online education platform Canvas went offline after a data breach on Thursday, temporarily leaving students and faculty at thousands of U.S. colleges — and K-12 schools — without access to course materials and communications during finals period.

CBS reports that Canvas, a cloud-based digital classroom platform with more than 30 million active users globally and over 9,000 school customers, experienced a major security breach on Thursday that left students and educators without access to essential classroom materials. The timing proved particularly troublesome as many schools are in the midst of final examinations or preparation periods.

Schools and universities across the country are recovering from an outage that knocked down Canvas, an online platform that manages exams, course notes, lecture videos and grades. The disruption tied to a cyberattack hit in the middle of finals period for many colleges, a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the platform.

Schools and universities across the country are recovering from an outage that knocked down Canvas, an online platform that manages exams, course notes, lecture videos and grades. The disruption tied to a cyberattack hit in the middle of finals period for many colleges, a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the platform.

Canvas is an education platform used by universities and schools across the U.S.

As those hours elapsed, I read more about the outage, which sounded serious. Hackers who had previously targeted Google and Ticketmaster had purposely chosen now, when college finals are happening, to threaten Instructure, the company that makes Canvas, that they would leak the personal information of 275 million Canvas users, among them teachers such as myself and the students in my class, if the company didn’t pay up. That leverage was possible because so many universities have outsourced course management—a concept that didn’t exist when I was a student—to a handful of companies providing it via cloud-based “software as a service,” and at great expense.

An expert says the hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed.

Late Thursday night, Canvas, which has more than 30 million active users around the world, from kindergartens to all Ivy League universities, was beginning to come back online, according to Utah-based parent company Instructure. But many students and faculty were still feeling the effects of the hack on Friday.

A hacking group that claimed responsibility for attacking Canvas’s parent company said it had gained access to data from more than 275 million people across 9,000 schools.

This week’s hack into information from almost 9,000 schools included personally identifying data. It was not the first big edtech breach.

The hacking group ShinyHunters reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, which caused the academic software Canvas used by thousands of schools and universities to go offline.

Education tool Canvas hacked, multiple US college newspapers report  Reuters

It's not currently known just how many people are potentially affected, though some estimate up to 9,000 colleges and universities may be.