An educational software used by thousands of students across Maryland and the nation from kindergarten through college was disrupted this week by a cyberattack.
School systems and colleges paused use of the widely used education system known as Canvas to manage grades, assignments, lecture videos and more in the wake of the apparent ransomware attack.
The software’s vendor, a company known as Instructure, confirmed that the Canvas Learning Management System was hacked earlier this week.
The cyberattack and subsequent outage impacted public school systems in Anne Arundel, Harford, Howard and Montgomery counties, as well as Baltimore City, and Howard Community College, the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, College Park.
A hacking group known as ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.
Screen shots provided by Connolly showed that the group has threatened to leak the trove of data.
Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for criminal hackers, who are locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were on paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Baltimore City and County public schools, Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.
On its status page, Instructure said that, as of 9:17 p.m. Thursday, “Canvas is Available for Most Users. Canvas Beta and Canvas Test are still in maintenance.”
On Friday, it had no reports of incidents as of 10:30 a.m.
Some educational institutions are already back to using the site.
“We alerted students last night about the Canvas outage then sent a message this morning telling them that Canvas is back online,” said Doug Donovan, a Johns Hopkins spokesperson, in a statement.
The Associated Press and Banner reporter Ellie Wolfe contributed to this article.
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