Canvas cyberattack disrupts North Texas schools
Schools affected by Canvas data breach
A cyber attack caused chaos for students at thousands of colleges and schools across the country on Thursday. That includes some in North Texas.
PLANO, Texas - A cyberattack on an online learning platform disrupted schools and universities nationwide, including many in North Texas.
Canvas Outage
What we know:
The Canvas outage and data breach on Thursday impacted more than 30 million active users across the nation, just as many were preparing to take final exams.
Canvas is one of the most widely used learning education platforms. Students and teachers use it to access assignments, grades, lecture videos, and course materials.
The hacking group known as ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and threatened to release sensitive student data.
Canvas reportedly hacked by ShinyHunters, claiming data breach
Canvas, a widely used learning management system by Instructure, experienced outages Thursday afternoon.
What they're saying:
A cybersecurity analyst said hackers are increasingly targeting schools and universities.
"We are looking to a possible big data leak of minor data, student data, which can be potentially concerning," said Juan Guevara Torres, a tech expert.
Local perspective:
Several school districts in North Texas have said they were impacted, including Plano and Allen ISDs.
Colleges across the metroplex also report problems, such as Southern Methodist University and Tarrant County Community College.
SMU told FOX 4 that exams originally scheduled for Friday would take place on Sunday, May 10, while Saturday exams would take place as currently scheduled.
SMU reschedules exams after cyber attack
A massive cyber attack on Canvas, a service used by many North Texas schools, has forced exams to be moved from their original dates. FOX 4's Lori Brown has more.
The rescheduling comes to the chagrin of several SMU students.
"I was hoping that they were going to cancel finals, but they did not," SMU student Angela Fotopoulos said.
"I was just hoping to get studying as soon as I could, but it was unfortunate because some people want to study that night, and they weren't able to, so definitely frustrating."
"I just heard that my roommate said that Canvas was under maintenance, and then I saw online that every single school, people were having this issue where Canvas was actually hacked so you can access any of your school resources right as everyone is studying for finals, which I should be taking right now," said Will Boyer, another SMU student.
DALLAS - JANUARY 23: A student walks on the Southern Methodist University (SMU) campus January 23, 2007 in Dallas, Texas. Some faculty and students at SMU are worried that if U.S. President George W. Bush's presidential library is based on their camp
What we don't know:
Officials with Canvas’s parent company, Infrastructure, have not released details about the extent of the breach or when service will be fully restored.
The Source: The information in this story comes from the Associated Press, emails from school districts and universities.