Access to educational platform Canvas was restored on Friday after a major cyber attack affected students’ access to the tool worldwide.
Thousands of students, most of whom were in the middle of final exams, lost access to the program, causing chaos in schools and universities.
Canvas is used by schools, colleges, and universities for grading, a hub for digital lectures and course content, a discussion board for classroom projects, and as a messaging platform between students and instructors.
Several university student newspapers in the US reported on the hack on Thursday.
Harvard University student newspaper harvard crimson It was reported that students could not access the site since Thursday because the site was redirecting users to a message from a group called ShinyHunters, which claimed responsibility for the attack and posted a list of targeted schools.
In response to the outage, university teachers reported that they had to resort to workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. Some schools were forced to postpone final examinations scheduled for Friday.
What is ShinyHunters?
ShinyHunters is a loose association of teenage and young adult hackers in the US and UK.
The group has been linked to other large-scale cyberattacks against major entities such as venue ticket sales platform Ticketmaster.
The group described itself as “rooting its systems since 1919”, referencing a term used to describe access to the deepest layer of a computer system.
ShinyHunters sent out a warning about its activities earlier this week, threatening that the data of approximately 9,000 schools and 275 million individuals would be leaked if the schools did not pay the ransom by the May 6 deadline.
Reuters reported that some schools reached out to the group for talks.
On May 5, ShinyHunters accused Canvas’ parent company Instructor of not even bothering to talk to them about preventing the data leak, saying their demands were “not as high as you might think.”
Edited by: Dmytro Lyubenko