Canvas outage sends students scrambling in Chicago, Illinois, as end of spring semester looms
The Canvas outage has stretched into a second day, leaving students and teachers in the Chicago and Illinois university systems scrambling amid the end of the spring semester.
The digital learning platform that is heavily relied upon by students and staff alike abruptly went offline Thursday afternoon amid a cyberattack and ransom demands.
Thursday, the University of Illinois sent out an email to faculty, staff and students, writing in part, "Canvas, our learning management system, is offline due to an ongoing cybersecurity incident." Later that night, U of I Urbana-Champaign announced they would postpone all final exams and assignments scheduled for Friday, Saturday or Sunday, including for classes that don't use Canvas.
The cloudy-based digital classroom system is used at more than 98,000 institutions and has nearly 275 million users. Students and faculty use it for notes, study guides and even actual final exams.
Instructure released a statement Friday morning saying an "unauthorized actor" in the incident made changes to pages that appeared to students and teachers when they were logged into their Canvas platforms. The company said they took Canvas down "out of an abundance of caution," and said the hacker used an issue related to their Free-For-Teacher accounts to conduct the cyberattack.
"As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down our Free-For-Teacher accounts," the company said in their statement. "This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use. We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused."
Canvas is now back in service at UIC, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and most other area schools. But the issue could not have come at a worse time for students and faculty, as they are approaching or have already started final exams to close out the spring semester.
"Just today I had a quiz, but it was hard to study for that because Canvas was not up," said Northwestern student David Kim.
Kim said he uses the canvas system to access his grades, but it holds a lot of course material that he relies on to study.
"There's really no other effective resource to study with," he said.
When Kim and others logged onto Canvas Thursday, the either were met with a message reading "Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance" or a message from hacking group Shinyhunters.
"It says Shinyhunters has breached Instructure," NU student Rahmah Malik said. ") Instead of contacting us to resolve they ignored us and did some 'security patches.' You have until the end of by 12th May before everything is leaked."
Claroty Field Chief Technology Officer Sean Tufts said there are multiple reasons Canvas was hacked.
"I think we are exiting a phase of cyber where China hacked for secrets, North Korea hacked for money, and Russia hacked to destabilize. Now all of those actors are looking to make impact on America's day to day lives," he said.
Instructure said names, email addresses, student IDs and peer-to-peer messages were exposed in the data breach. There's no evidence that passwords, financial information or dates of birth were hacked.
Tufts said universities should prepare for days like this.
"Best preparation is practice and what that means is not waiting for the attack and encouraging attackers. What that means having table talk exercises, practicing when systems go down," he said.
Other schools, like the University of Chicago, are bouncing back faster. Tufts said each IT system is very complex and will not all recover at the same time.