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.
440 Articles
440 Articles
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…
Canvas hack disrupts finals week at San Antonio colleges
The hack disrupted access to the online platform on Thursday, but most of the access had been restored by Friday with some warnings issued.Canvas hack disrupts finals week at San Antonio colleges was first posted on May 8, 2026 at 1:01 pm.©2021 "San Antonio Report". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact m…
Cyberattack upends finals week at some Mass. colleges, as online access slowly returns
Universities and other schools across the globe — including in Massachusetts — have been affected by a cyber attack on their learning management system this week, wreaking havoc with some Bay State schools during exam finals.
Morgan County Citizen
capitol-beat.orgGeorgia 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…
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