Cyberattack on system used by thousands of US schools disrupts final exams

A system that thousands of schools and universities in the US use was offline on Thursday during a cyber-attack, creating chaos as students tried to study for finals and underscoring education’s dependence on technology.

Students quickly took to social media to ask if others were unable to access Canvas, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.

Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents. Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.

“This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident,” wrote the director of information technology at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health when announcing that the school’s online system was down. “Hopefully we will have a resolution soon.”

Virginia Tech acknowledged in a notice to students that the administration was aware of the effect on final exams and other end-of-semester activities. The University of New Mexico sent a similar message to the campus community, and the University of Florida urged students to stay alert for any phishing messages that appear to be from Canvas.

Teachers say they are having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments.

Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a post on the social media platform X that his students had been relying on Canvas to access every reading from the semester and all of his lecture slides before their Monday final exams. The outage leaves students and faculty “dead in the water here in academia right now”, he said.

The student newspaper at Harvard University reported that the system there was down as well. Students at Johns Hopkins University simply got an error message when trying to view their final grades on the platform on Thursday. And public school districts also sought to reassure parents, with officials in Spokane, Washington, writing that they were not “aware of any sensitive data contained in this breach”.

The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, did not immediately respond to a request for comment or questions about whether the system was taken down as a precaution or because the hackers knocked it offline.

Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.

Screenshots Connolly provided showed that the group began threatening on Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of 7 and 12 May. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing.

Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis public schools and the Los Angeles Unified school district.

Instructure has not posted about the attack on its social media.

Connolly said the Canvas attack was strikingly similar to a breach at PowerSchool, which also offers learning management tools. In that case a student at a Massachusetts college was charged.

Connolly described ShinyHunters as a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the US and the United Kingdom. The group has also been tied to other attacks, including one aimed at Live Nation’s Ticketmaster subsidiary.