You can read the Spanish translation of this article here
FAIRFIELD, CA., – During the spring ramp-up towards finals week, Instructure, the publisher and developer of Canvas, was hacked for the second time in the past six days by the criminal black-hat hacker organization ShinyHunters, affecting, reportedly, over 9,000 different schools and academic institutions, including Solano Community College and the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District.
In a message on the Canvas opening page of a U.C. Davis student, ShinyHunters claimed to have the data of these endangered institutions and threatened to release the information of “any of the schools in the affected list.” This includes all 116 California Community Colleges.
“ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches.’” The group stated in the message.
On their status update page, Instructure offered a short statement regarding Canvas’s status, saying “we anticipate (Canvas) being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible.”
Although none of the Solano IT department staff were able to offer any in-depth comments to The Pulse, Vice President of Academic Affairs David Williams sent out an email making all SCC faculty privy to the website’s outage.
“This week we learned of a cybersecurity incident impacting Instructure, the provider of the Canvas platform, as a part of a broader event impacting multiple institutions across the country. The situation escalated today, as we are now experiencing a full Canvas outage,” Williams explained.
“We are now working on a message to students who are likely extremely stressed.” This message has now been sent via text to Solano students.
As Williams mentioned, and as the affected-schools list provided by ShinyHunters says, California community colleges aren’t the only institutions with no access to Canvas. Per Duke University’s student-led newspaper, The Chronicle, they reported the same message appearing on their compromised Canvas shell that the U.C. Davis student had, linking the two schools, separated by 2,779 miles.
The first instance of the organization’s infiltration of Canvas’s parent producer this week was recorded last Friday May 1, hence the “again” in parentheses in ShinyHunter’s message. This is corroborated by the U.C. Davis IT status page, which states that Instructure reported a “global cybersecurity incident” on May 1.
The University of California Office of the President released a statement yesterday regarding this announcement, warning students to “watch for unexpected messages that seem to come from UC” and that the University of California colleges “will never ask for passwords, Social Security numbers, birthdates, or bank account information through email, text, or phone calls.”
Solano student Evan Winston shared how fellow students might stress due to Canvas being down, especially with the date not too far from finals week. When asked about his thoughts, Winston explained he felt “kind of worrisome for some of the students who rely on Canvas…to study on there, or even for homework, near finals, because most of their grades depend on it.”
