Cyberattack Hits Canvas System Used by Thousands of Schools as Finals Loom

A system that thousands of schools and universities use was offline Thursday during a cyberattack, creating chaos as students tried to study for finals and underscoring education’s dependence on technology. The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment or questions about whether the system was taken down as a precaution or because the hackers knocked it offline. Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said. Students quickly took to social media to ask if others were unable to access Canvas, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams. Screen shots Connolly provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing. Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Instructure has not posted about the attack on its social media. Connolly said the Canvas attack is strikingly similar to a breach at PowerSchool, which also offers learning management tools. In that case a Massachusetts college student was charged. Connolly described ShinyHunters as a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The group also has been tied to a other attacks, including one aimed at Live Nation’s Ticketmaster subsidiary. Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents. “This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident,” the director of information technology at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health wrote in announcing that the school’s online system was down. “Hopefully we will have a resolution soon.” Virginia Tech acknowledged in a notice to students that the administration was aware of the effect on final exams and other end-of-semester activities. The University of New Mexico sent a similar message to the campus community, and the University of Florida urged students to stay alert for any phishing messages that appear to be from Canvas. Teachers say they are having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a post on the social media platform X that his students had been relying on Canvas to access every reading from the semester and all of his lecture slides before their Monday final exams. The outage leaves students and faculty “dead in the water here in academia right now,” he said. The student newspaper at Harvard reported that the system there was down as well. Students at Johns Hopkins University simply got an error message when trying to view their final grades on the platform Thursday. And public school districts also sought to reassure parents, with officials in Spokane, Washington, writing that they aren’t “aware of any sensitive data contained in this breach.” Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage. WRITTEN BY Associated Press More from Associated Press US Military Reaches Deals With 7 Tech Companies to Use Their AI on Classified Systems Germany Suspects Russia Is Behind Signal Phishing That Targeted Top Officials US Launches Sweeping Crackdown on Southeast Asia Cyberscams and Sanctions Cambodian Senator Trump Administration Vows Crackdown on Chinese Companies ‘Exploiting’ AI Models Made in US Most Serious Cyberattacks Against the UK Now From Russia, Iran and China, Cyber Chief Says Senate Extends Surveillance Powers Until April 30 After Chaotic Votes in House White House Chief of Staff to Meet With Anthropic CEO Over Its New AI Technology Lawmakers Gathered Quietly to Talk About AI. Angst and Fears of ‘Destruction’ Followed Latest News In Other News: Train Hacker Arrested, PamDOORa Linux Backdoor, New CISA Director Frontrunner Polish Security Agency Reports ICS Breaches at Five Water Treatment Plants AI Firm Braintrust Prompts API Key Rotation After Data Breach ‘PCPJack’ Worm Removes TeamPCP Infections, Steals Credentials Ransomware Group Takes Credit for Trellix Hack Vulnerability in Claude Extension for Chrome Exposes AI Agent to Takeover Ivanti Patches EPMM Zero-Day Exploited in Targeted Attacks Worries About AI’s Risks to Humanity Loom Over the Trial Pitting Musk Against OpenAI’s Leaders Trending Webinar: ROSI For CPS Security Programs May 13, 2026 In cyber-physical systems (CPS), just one hour of downtime can outweigh an entire annual security budget. Learn how to master the Return on Security Investment (ROSI) to align security goals with the bottom-line priorities. Register Virtual Event: Threat Detection And Incident Response Summit May 20, 2026 Delve into big-picture strategies to reduce attack surfaces, improve patch management, conduct post-incident forensics, and tools and tricks needed in a modern organization. Register People on the Move Malwarebytes has named Chung Ip as Chief Financial Officer. Semperis has appointed John Podboy as Chief Information Security Officer. Randy Menon has become Chief Product and Marketing Officer at One Identity. More People On The Move Expert Insights The Mythos Moment: Enterprises Must Fight Agents With Agents Only with the right platform and an agentic, AI-driven defense, will enterprises be able to protect themselves in the agentic era. (Etay Maor) Why Cybersecurity Must Rethink Defense In The Age Of Autonomous Agents From autonomous code generation to decision-making systems that initiate actions without human intervention, the industry is entering a new phase. (Torsten George) Government Can’t Win The Cyber War Without The Private Sector Securing national resilience now depends on faster, deeper partnerships with the private sector. (Steve Durbin) The Hidden ROI Of Visibility: Better Decisions, Better Behavior, Better Security Beyond monitoring and compliance, visibility acts as a powerful deterrent, shaping user behavior, improving collaboration, and enabling more accurate, data-driven security decisions. (Joshua Goldfarb) The New Rules Of Engagement: Matching Agentic Attack Speed The cybersecurity response to AI-enabled nation-state threats cannot be incremental. It must be architectural. (Nadir Izrael) Flipboard Reddit Whatsapp Email