How North Texas schools were impacted by the recent Canvas hack

It's been nearly a week after the hacking group Shinyhunters allegedly targeted and hacked the Canvas online education platform. While parent company Instructure has struck a deal with the group to bring Canvas back online, thousands of students, parents and schools across the country are still dealing with the headache. 

That includes students like Joey Gutierrez, who shared more with CBS News Texas about the issues he's still facing.

"It's up now, but it is kind of laggy, buggy," Gutierrez said.

CBS News Texas reached out to several school districts to check on the status of their access to the platform. Districts like Arlington ISD said Canvas is fully functional for them, but parents in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD said their students still don't have access.

"Just an error," said student Damien Newman. "It gives me a notification that it's down."

A GCISD spokesperson confirmed the district has not yet restored access to Canvas, adding that the district is consulting with cybersecurity experts and will provide an update on whether Canvas access can be safely restored before the end of the school year, which some students said is frustrating.

"The projects that we have on Canvas, we can't turn them into Canvas, so now we have to email our teachers," said student Rachel Kaiser.

Her friend, Noreen KC, echoed that sentiment.

"They said they think it's going to be like this for the rest of the year," said KC. "So, all our finals, we're trying to find a way to do it right now. It's between paper and an old thing that we used to use called Google Classroom, and both are pretty hard for us now, because we haven't used them for a few years."

Instructure said in Tuesday's announcement that part of the deal involved was for the hackers to delete the data they got. That data, however, can't be recovered according to Ben Singleton, a cybersecurity expert with NetGenius.

"Once the data has been stolen, there's no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. It's already been stolen," he said.

Singleton adds that Instructure's main goal now is to limit the possibility of that data being released publicly in the future.

"They're encouraged not to keep their business running, but there's nothing preventing them from doing that," Singleton said. "If they don't like part of the deal, or if there's some fallout from it or whatever, they still have that data and can release it." 

Singleton suggests that parents monitor credit reports, change passwords, enable multi-factor authentication and remain vigilant.

"I'd put the likelihood that that data gets disseminated somewhere below 50%, so let's hope that that's what happens," he said.