The University of Toronto is one of thousands of educational institutions worldwide affected by a major cyberattack on Thursday, causing widespread disruption as students prepared for final exams. The incident has raised concerns about the reliance on technology in education.
Cyberattack on Canvas system
The hacking group ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for the breach of Canvas, a web-based learning management system used by schools to manage grades, course notes, assignments, and lecture videos. In an online post, ShinyHunters stated that nearly 9,000 schools globally were impacted, with billions of private messages and other records accessed.
The parent company of Canvas, known at U of T as Quercus, is managing the cybersecurity incident. Multiple universities are affected, and U of T's learning management services remain unavailable until further notice.
Student panic on social media
On social media, many students expressed panic as they were unable to access Canvas to view course materials for their final exams. Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Emisoft, told The Associated Press that ShinyHunters began threatening on Sunday to leak the stolen data, with deadlines set for Thursday and May 12. The later date suggests that discussions regarding extortion payments may still be ongoing.
Schools are rich in digital data, making them prime targets for hackers who seek sensitive files that were once stored on paper. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, has not yet posted about the cyberattack on social media. Connolly noted that the Canvas attack is similar to a breach at PowerSchool, another provider of learning management tools.
Who is ShinyHunters?
ShinyHunters is a hacking group composed of teenagers and young adults from the United States and United Kingdom. The group has been linked to other high-profile attacks, including one targeting Ticketmaster.
Schools in the U.S. have begun notifying parents and students about the breach. Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said on X that his students relied on Canvas for all course readings and lecture slides ahead of their final exams. The outage left students and faculty "dead in the water here in academia right now," he said. Linker later posted that Canvas had been restored at Penn, writing, "Academia has been revived/no longer dead in the water."
Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were postponing finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.
