School app Canvas breach hits during finals
Canvas, the school platform used by millions, went down during finals week after Instructure detected unauthorized activity tied to a cybersecurity breach.
TL;DR
- Canvas, a platform used by colleges, universities, and K-12 schools, went offline for several hours due to a cybersecurity incident.
- The outage occurred during finals week, causing significant disruption for students and teachers.
- Instructure, the company behind Canvas, detected unauthorized activity, citing an issue with its Free-For-Teacher accounts.
- A hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the attack and threatened to leak data.
- Personal information such as names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among users were compromised.
- Instructure stated that passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers, or financial information were not involved.
- Canvas is now fully back online, but Free-For-Teacher accounts remain temporarily shut down.
- Users are advised to be cautious of potential phishing scams using compromised information and to enable multi-factor authentication.