Georgia schools caught in nationwide Canvas hack as extortion threat emerges
Capitol Beat Weekly Digest
By Ty Tagami
Capitol Beat News Service
A shadowy group claimed to have hacked Canvas, disrupting schools and colleges across the country that use the learning platform, including in Georgia.
Schools rely on the digital hub for submitting assignments, checking grades and communication between students and instructors.
The Utah-based company Instructure placed its platform in “maintenance mode” Thursday while investigating the breach, though a subsequent update said service had been restored for “most” users.
The outage hit the Georgia Institute of Technology, where students were alerted Thursday to a “major cybersecurity breach” affecting Canvas. By Friday, Georgia Tech said access had been partially restored and urged students to contact instructors directly about affected assignments.
The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania reported that the group ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen emails, private messages, student names, ID numbers and course enrollments.
The hackers were threatening to release purloined student data and were demanding ransom money.
The Fulton County School System said on a web page devoted to the crisis that Canvas was “completely down and inoperable for students, parents, and teachers.” Fulton said Instructure indicated passwords, Social Security numbers and financial data were not involved, but names, email addresses, assignments and internal messages may have been.
The Georgia Department of Education directed its Georgia Virtual School students and staff to stop using Canvas.
The disruption could affect students seeking college scholarships. Without access to Canvas, school systems that use it cannot compute their grade point averages.
This could be a problem even in school districts that do not contract with Instructure.
That is because many districts have students who turn to the Georgia Virtual School for Advanced Placement classes that are unavailable locally.
“They’re going to have trouble calculating salutatorians and valedictorians unless they find another way around that,” said John Zauner, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association. “They’ve got two weeks to get it resolved.”
