Teachers and students alike across the country were sent scrambling on May 7 after the popular learning management system Canvas was breached by the now-notorious hacker group ShinyHunters.
ShinyHunters initially infiltrated Canvas back on May 1, claiming to have stolen 3.65 TB of data ranging from student names to ID numbers and email addresses. Luckily, they did not take any passwords or financial information of students.
Students who tried to access Canvas during the shutdown were met with a black screen that said, “ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches’.”
The message continued to give the affected schools, as well as Instructure (the owner of Canvas), until May 12 to come to an agreement on the ransom price, before all of the stolen data is released. The message also included a list of affected schools, including WCPSS.
This is the 40th known attack from the ShinyHunters group since 2019. Their other targets include popular restaurants, airlines, security companies and even several banks.
This morning teachers had to switch up their lesson plans so that they could work around the breach, moving toward paper assignments as opposed to the electronic assignments they had planned weeks in advance.
“The group of nerds and losers who hacked Canvas suck. They are making it hard for me to do my assignments, and making me use paper, killing all of the trees,” said senior Brady Thomas.
In response to the threat, Canvas has been removed from the WakeID portal, as well as blocked on all WCPSS devices. Some colleges and other school systems have announced that they have returned to Canvas and that it is working properly, but it is unclear when Wake County will be able to access it.
This is the second time in the past year that a WCPSS-used service has been hacked and threatened with leaks. At the end of last school year, PowerSchools was hacked and led to Wake County switching over to Infinite Campus. The precedent set by that switch leads some to believe that next year might see a switch to another LMS like Google Classroom or Blackboard.
Canvas costs between $5 and 30 per student, and with over 161,000 students enrolled in Wake County Schools, the county is paying between $805,000 and 4.83 million per year on a system that isn’t working and will potentially leak personal information of every single student to possibly dangerous outside organizations.
Senior Max Martinez said, “Wake County Public School System actively chooses to cut corners… in doing so causes security risks, weak digital infrastructure, and the lack of accessibility. These breaches are proof of this.”
This is now the third technological mishap from Wake County in the past year— the others being the aforementioned PowerSchool hack and the failed implementation of the Lightspeed censorship system. Between those three situations, some people are questioning the validity of the $30 million per year spent by Wake County on technology.
