Schools reach out to Canvas hackers as breach hits US classrooms, source says

Some schools and universities whose students’ data was stolen by a cybercriminal hacking group as part of an April breach of the educational tool Canvas have reached out to the hackers to prevent their data from being released, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. Shiny Hunters, a hacking group with a string of data theft and extortion campaigns targeting major global companies, said in a May 3 post on its website that it had stolen roughly 6.65 terabytes of Canvas data related to nearly 9,000 schools worldwide that included student names, email addresses and private messages between students, teachers, and other staff. Student newspapers across the country reported this week that the hack was causing widespread disruption as students prepare for end-of-year tasks and assignments. The software is used by schools for class assignments and information sharing, as well as messages between students and school faculty. The FBI said on Friday it was aware of a breach disrupting the U.S. education system, without naming Canvas. On May 5, the group posted a message saying that Canvas’ parent company, Instructure, had “not even bothered speaking to us” to prevent a data leak, and that their demand “was not even as high as you might think it is”. The message included a list of roughly 1,400 individual schools and districts, and invited the schools to contact them to negotiate and prevent data from being posted. Instructure announced in a May 1 post on its support website that it was investigating a cybersecurity incident. A post the next day, signed by Chief Information Security Officer Steve Proud, said the “information involved” included Canvas user names, email addresses, student ID numbers and messages among users. In a May 6 update, the company said the situation was resolved and that Canvas was fully operational. On May 7, students at multiple schools reported attempting to log into Canvas and finding a note from ShinyHunters with a link to the list of affec