Riverside Community College District sent out a notice via e-mail warning students and faculty to not access Canvas due to a recent “cyber incident,” on May 7, at approximately 1:25 p.m.
Canvas is a widely-adopted educational program that institutes use to provide learning materials for students. At Riverside City College, Canvas is utilized for in-person classes and is heavily relied on by instructors who teach online courses.
“Situations like this make Canvas completely unreliable, unfortunately, but that’s not the school’s fault,” RCC online student Krista Smith said.
A group by the name of “ShinyHunters” hacked Canvas and threatened to release all of the app’s data unless each school could reach a settlement.
ShinyHunters is a prolific hacking group that gained attention in 2020 after claiming they had stolen data amounting to over 200 million user records from 13 major companies.
Their data breaches have affected millions of users worldwide, not just those based in the U.S. like RCCD. They claimed to have stolen over 90 million records worth of data from an Indonesian e-commerce site Tokopedia.
The group is also familiar with breaching school-based infrastructure, having previously targeted Indian education platform Unacademy.
There is no reliable source on the origin of the group. They seem to have a global team of hackers working together to attack large scale companies and leak their user data online.
Alongside the shutdown of the site came a surge of phishing scam emails that appeared in some student inboxes.
A phishing campaign is when a coordinated group conducts a cyberattack using fake emails, texts, or calls to deceive people into giving up their information.
Due to this breach in security, students were forced to stop in the middle of their assignments and wonder how to now meet their deadlines.
“I had a paper due this week and I have no access to the sources I am supposed to use anymore,” student Emma Gomez said.
During the cyberattack, many schools were in the middle of their spring finals season, meaning that there was no way to complete their exams and officially end their classes.
Thomas Corrigan, a communications instructor at Cal State University San Bernardino, said he was at home working when the Canvas shutdown occurred.
“I was trying to get a grasp on what it meant for our courses.” Corrigan said. “…[it] raised some concerns about student access to course materials to prepare for our exam next week. I also lost my access to the course gradebook.”
As of May 11, RCCD has issued an email to advise students and instructors that access to Canvas had been restored.
Any students that still have trouble accessing the site are being guided to reach out to the RCCD IT help desk for assistance.
