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The Canvas online learning system, used in thousands of schools and universities around the world, came to a standstill after a cyber attack on Thursday. This outage, which happened just before the final exams, left lakhs of students and teachers in trouble.
Canvas is used for online learning, assignments, grades, lecture videos and exam materials. After the system shutdown, students could not access their notes, lecture slides and final exam materials. A large number of students complained on social media that they were not able to prepare for the exam.
According to Luke Connolly, threat analyst at cyber security firm Emisoft, a hacker group named ShinyHunters has taken responsibility for the attack. The group claimed that it had accessed billions of private messages and records of about 9 thousand schools and educational institutions.
According to reports, hackers were threatening to leak the data since Sunday. He has set the deadline for Thursday and May 12. Experts believe that this could be a case related to ransom.
However, Canvas’s parent company Instructure has not yet clarified whether the system was shut down due to security reasons or the hackers stalled it technically.
America’s University of Iowa described it as a ‘national level cyber security incident’. Virginia Tech said the outage is impacting final exams and semester activities. The University of Texas at San Antonio has postponed some final exams.
A senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania said that students were dependent on Canvas for their studies for the entire semester and now the academic system has been completely disrupted.
According to experts, the large amount of digital data present in educational institutions makes them a major target for cyber criminals. Even before this, many school districts of America have become victims of major cyber attacks.
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