Canvas Cyberattack Leaves Thousands of Students Scrambling Amid Finals
The attack locked students out of assignments and grades, and ShinyHunters claimed it stole 275 million records from 8,809 institutions, officials said.
- On Thursday, May 7, 2026, the hacking group ShinyHunters breached Instructure, forcing the Canvas learning management system offline nationwide during finals week at over 8,000 institutions.
- Instructure serves more than 8,000 institutions globally, making Canvas a dominant learning management platform and prime target for cybercriminals seeking to access mass quantities of student data through centralized infrastructure.
- ShinyHunters claims to have stolen 3.65 terabytes of data including names, emails, student IDs, and private messages, while demanding a ransom settlement by May 12, 2026, to prevent public release.
- Universities including Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania postponed exams and advised students to remain vigilant against phishing attempts while forensic experts investigate the incident.
- The breach exposes structural risks of vendor concentration in ed-tech, where a single security failure at one company compromises millions of users across thousands of institutions globally.
461 Articles
461 Articles
Cyberattack affecting local Florida schools, universities
A cyberattack is disrupting the online learning platform Canvas, affecting thousands of schools in Florida and around the world as students prepare for finals.The tech company targeted is called Instructure and they operate the online learning platform called Canvas. Canvas is used by major universities like Harvard and Princeton, along with K-12 districts. Some users who tried logging in this week were redirected to a page carrying an ominous m…
Canvas Back Online After Cyberattack Disrupts Schools
After a cyberattack had earlier knocked it offline, throwing schools and universities into turmoil, tens of thousands of students studying for final exams around the world Friday regained access to a key online learning system.
Canvas Cyberattack Leaves Vegas Students in Limbo as Ransom Deadline Looms
LAS VEGAS, NV — A massive cybersecurity breach targeting Instructure, the parent company of the Canvas learning management system, continues to paralyze digital classrooms across the Clark County School District (CCSD) and the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE). The hacking group ShinyHunters has officially claimed responsibility for the attack, which analysts are calling the largest educational security breach in history. The Breach: Scop…
Canvas ransomware breach disrupts Mississippi colleges and universities
GULFPORT, Miss. (WLOX) — A ransomware group has claimed to have breached the learning management system Canvas, possibly exposing millions of personal records of students, teachers, and staff across the country. Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College is one of the many academic institutions that use Canvas. In a statement to WLOX on Friday, MGCCC officials said the following: “This was a national incident that affected 9,000 colleges and univ…
Chaos erupts as cyberattack disrupts learning platform Canvas amid finals
Chaos erupted at schools and colleges throughout the US on Thursday as a cyberattack disrupted online learning platform Canvas just as students were due to take final exams. Canvas parent company Instructure said that as of Friday morning, the platform was back online. Instructure said it temporarily took Canvas offline on Thursday after identifying unauthorized activity in its network. The threat actor was the same one responsible for a data br…
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