Canvas Cyberattack Leaves Thousands of Students Scrambling Amid Finals
Instructure said it revoked access tokens and added monitoring after the breach, while Canvas returned for most users and no passwords were believed exposed.
- 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.
372 Articles
372 Articles
Georgia schools caught in nationwide Canvas hack as extortion threat emerges
ATLANTA — A shadowy group that claims to have hacked a popular educational platform is reportedly trying to extort money from colleges and schools across the country, including in Georgia. The group, which calls itself “ShinyHunters,” claims to have hacked the Canvas platform, a popular digital hub for submitting assignments, taking quizzes, checking grades and communicating with instructors. The product was developed by Instructure, a global ed…
TWU regains access to Canvas after nartionwide outage. Other universities are still waiting.
Texas Woman's University regained access this morning to Canvas, a popular learning management system that has been hacked by a criminal extortion group over the last month. The hackers demanded payment from the parent company, Instructure, to prevent the deliberate…
Canvas back online after cyber attack that affected Broward County Public Schools, FIU
Broward County Public Schools and Florida International University are among the thousands of school systems and universities that use Canvas in their classrooms across the country.
Popular higher ed system ‘Canvas’ hacked, putting millions of students’ personal data at risk
A massive cyberattack that crippled the Canvas online learning platform as finals were getting underway at many universities could leave them scrambling for as long as a month — and expose the education software giant to major legal and financial fallout, cybersecurity experts told The Post.
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