Across the nation between May 7 and May 12, the schoolwork website Canvas was shut down. Canvas was breached, and to prevent student information from being accessed, Canvas was removed from all Wake County computers.

The shutdown meant that online work was far less practical, and most work was done on paper or sent to students via e-mail. For classes that rely on Canvas to assign work, this was a difficult time period. Some classes remained mostly unaffected, such as most math classes, but almost every student working with Canvas was in some way inconvenienced or negatively affected.

Most students had at least one class in which they could not work at all, and one where things went as normal. With Canvas down, students with active or due work could not submit assignments, leading to slower grading and temporary dips in grades.

“In at least two of my classes, I literally couldn’t do anything. 
All the other ones, I was perfectly fine, to be honest”,  sophomore Tai Glen said.

Canvas was taken over by an unknown source hacking group called “ShinyHunters”. They demanded a ransom for the return of Canvas and the deletion of stolen student information. Canvas’ parent company, Instructure, has not yet said if they paid said ransom or not. ShinyHunters has promised not to extort people’s information, but no one can be sure if they will, and they claim that near nine thousand schools have been affected.

ShinyHunters is notorious for hacking large information platforms and holding them for ransom and selling stolen information on dark web forums.  They have hacked companies before such as Microsoft, 7-Eleven, AT&T, Ticketmaster, and PowerSchool.

This all means that your information could have been susceptible to the data breach. Often this can lead to unknown contacts and scammers using your information to lure you. These scams can look like e-mails requiring personal information, ranging from fake college e-mails needing passwords to fake fines looking for banking info.

With this new breach in security, expect more scam e-mails and be careful who you give information to. The shutdown ended this Tuesday and work will resume, but remember to stay safe and be careful.