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Canvas breach disrupts school and colleges
Canvas is used to manage courses, allows professors to grade assignments, and enables students to communicate with those professors. But it went dark for around 90,000 schools after reporting a global outage around 4 p.m. Thursday. An estimated 275 million students were affected, including those at Wayne State University.
(FOX 2) - A recent data breach is affecting Canvas, a program used by tens of thousands of schools across the country and here in Michigan.
Big picture view:
Canvas is used to manage courses, allows professors to grade assignments, and enables students to communicate with those professors. But it went dark for around 90,000 schools after reporting a global outage around 4 p.m. Thursday. An estimated 275 million students were affected, including those at Wayne State University.
"Obviously, I was a little bit shocked in the beginning because I was in the process of finalizing grades after final exams, so my teaching assistant reached out to me to report the attack happening. The first thing I was worrying about was how to do the final grade," said Professor Rhongho Jang.
Thankfully, Wayne State had already finished finals before the data breach. Had that not been the case, the situation would’ve been much worse. FOX 2 was told the leak included limited personal information.
Cyberattack targets multiple Michigan schools, universities in massive ransomware strike
Thousands of universities, including many in Michigan, were the victim of a massive third-party cyberattack.
What they're saying:
So what exactly were these hackers looking for? FOX 2 talked with a cybersecurity expert to break it all down.
"Attackers like this like to have a two-pronged offensive," said expert Colin Battersby. "One is to steal data, which is more often than not really to be—not to be misused in the typical sense of trying to open up lines of credit—but to put pressure on the organization to pay them to delete it so that it doesn’t get released. We don’t actually see a lot of identity theft coming out of the theft of this type of data. The other point is encrypted data. These folks can cause them to have to pay to get a key to regain access to operations."
FOX 2 was told experts worked through the night to get Canvas back online.
Students and faculty have regained access as of earlier today and can resume normal activity.