With the advance into the modern age, college learning has gone almost entirely digital. You'll find college students all over the country taking their exams on computer screens rather than pen and paper.
And one website and app they use to do this is called Canvas. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically the holy grail for educators. It's centralised, has in-house assessment moderation, and basically just keeps the well-oiled educational machines running across the country - and even the world.
Well, it and its parent company, Instructure, have faced a pretty big blow. As reported by PC Mag, they got hacked. And the timing couldn't be any worse: it happened in the middle of finals week.
Students, some in the middle of their finals exams, were just going about their days when an eerie message popped up in lieu of Canvas's typically warm website. In a pretty threatening black and red color-scape, a warning appeared.
"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches'." Not the most threatening in and of itself, right? But then, they revealed the ace up their sleeve.
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The Hacker Group Stole Certain Information About College Students
They attached to their message a link containing a list of over 9,000 educational institutions across the world that they held data on. ShinyHunters wrote, "If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement." They say they've stolen student ID numbers, emails, and messages exchanged within the website.
Pretty creepy stuff, right? But, my thoughts are with the students through this. Not only are they already in the midst of their finals week, already knee-deep in stress, but now they've got to think about the possibility of data being leaked too!
Canvas had their website turned completely off throughout most of the day yesterday to make some critical fixes to their security. Although they're back up and running now, many people are still a little wary.
Colleges across the country and the world have cancelled or postponed exams because of the hack. These include Penn State, Princeton, and the University of British Columbia.
