The Peralta Community College District sent out a districtwide email Friday morning that confirmed “Canvas is back up and all Canvas apps and services have been restored.” The notification followed a global ransomware attack on Canvas’s parent company, Instructure, that threatened to publicly release user data.
The email, sent at 11:05 a.m., urged students to “continue to use caution with any suspicious emails and links related to Canvas” and to “rely” on district communications for any following updates and instructions.
Canvas, an education management software, was removed from Peralta’s portal dashboard during the hack, and has now been reinstated.
Peralta’s Chief Technology and Information Systems Officer, Antoine Mehouelley, confirmed in a text message to The Citizen that the California Community College State Chancellor’s Office “completed [a] security review” of Canvas. The attack affected all 116 California Community Colleges and approximately 9,000 schools across the nation, according to reports.
The state chancellor’s office holds a statewide subscription with Instructure.
An email from district officials sent to faculty on Friday stated that “Canvas is now safe,” but users should remain “cautious” of potential phishing attempts.
The email stated that faculty should download their gradebooks and course materials and “look through court content for anything suspicious,” including links, images, and communication.
The district also recommended that faculty “consider preparing an alternative plan” for assignments during finals week, which starts on May 17.
On May 7, students and employees who logged into their Canvas account were shown a message by a black-hat cybercriminal organization, ShinyHunters, who claimed to have hacked into Instructure for a second time. The message by ShinyHunters claimed that Instructure “ignored” their requests to settle a prior breach of data that occurred over the weekend.
The message also addressed schools in the “affected list,” urging them to consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact ShinyHunters via an encrypted messenger application. They appealed to the academic institutions that complying meant schools were “interested in preventing the release of their data.”
ShinyHunters stated that Instructure has until May 12 to negotiate a settlement or else “everything is leaked.” The most recent updates from Instructure state that Canvas is “now available for most users” and the incident is under investigation.
It is still unclear if Instructure is in negotiations with ShinyHunters or if user data has been secured. The Citizen reached out to Instructure’s corporate communications department for more information but they did not respond in time for publication.
