California State University campuses, UCLA and thousands of other educational institutions across the country lost access to a key education computer platform Thursday due to a cyberattack targeting the software’s developer.
The attack, allegedly carried out by a hacking group called Shiny Hunters, targeted Instructure, developer of the Canvas education platform used at universities and school systems nationwide. The attack apparently began more than a week ago, but it led to outages of the Canvas system on Thursday.
An alert posted by the UCLA Chief Information Security Officers acknowledged the outage and said “our vendor is working toward a resolution.” Other University of California campuses were also being impacted.
The Long Beach-based California State University system stated online that Canvas was down at all of its campuses, and the Chancellor’s Office.
“Instructure is working diligently to gather more information and get systems restored,” according to the CSU website. “This situation is fluid, and we are working with Instructure to determine the full scope of impact and will provide updates as soon as they are available.”
The hack came as many students were using the Canvas system to take final exams. Some users reported that a message appeared on their computer screens from Shiny Hunters, which claimed to have captured the data of hundreds of millions of users which would be released if affected institutions did not arrange a “settlement” with the hacking group.
Instructure officials stated on the company’s website that it was investigating and working to resolve the issue.