Canvas has been taken offline by its parent company, Instructure, following a ransomware attack that may have compromised the data of millions of students, hours after Delta’s IT department disabled access to the service through Okta on May 7.
“An ongoing cybersecurity incident involving Canvas is affecting colleges and universities across the country, including Delta College,” said an email sent to students at 2:47 p.m.
Concerns over the outage are heightened as finals loom, though Delta has communicated that faculty will make adjustments to the finals schedule in response to the disruption.
“Please know that Delta College faculty are aware of the situation and we will work with faculty to make adjustments to assignment due dates and final exams,” according to the same email.
When reached for comment, Delta directed Collegian staff to the above email.
The information currently being used as leverage by the group claiming responsibility, ShinyHunters, was acquired in a May 1 cybersecurity incident against Instructure. The group responsible also claims that nearly 275 million records across 8,809 school districts were affected.
According to a post on the Instructure status page about the May 1 incident, the information acquired in this leak included names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, as well as messages among users.
Delta staff has also been encouraged to change their Okta logins, though there is currently no indication of an attack on Okta or that passwords were included in the compromised information.
