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Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

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Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#51

I use Canvas for some postgraduate studies, and my teenage daughter uses it at her high school. We already bond over how awful the Canvas UX is (and she has a bunch of Chrome extensions to improve it.) Now we’ve got something else to gripe over together.

Canvas seems like it’s not that great. But if you then use Blackboard Ultra it makes canvas look amazing.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#53
post #48

It's been a long time since I was in school. What does this software do?

It’s a “learning management system.” It replaces a course website in most instances. It’s also used for course grades and you can submit assignments or take quizzes.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#54
post #15

> Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance doesn't seem that scheduled to me

ex-Instructure employee here (though it's been about 10 years since I worked for them).

That's just the quickest page/status update to throw up; it was a one-liner to push it live back when I was on the deploy rotation.

I'd hazard a guess they have more important things to worry about right now than exact status page messaging ;)

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#55
Student at an impacted university here.

Our whole testing center is down. This is inconvenient, but mainly it's amusing. I swear strangers are talking to each other more. I'm noticing people just sitting in the sun and relaxing. Nature is healing.

(Of course, plenty of people have also just finished their exams, so it's hard to know the cause.)

Any idea what data Instructure-and-also-now-ShinyHunters even purport to have beyond names, profile photos, pronouns, homework assignments, school communications, phone numbers, and email addresses?

i.e. What makes this threat so different from what any old data brokers have already scraped?

What leverage besides aura farming do the ShinyHunters really have?

All I can think of that's really valuable is passwords. And private communications in Canvas DMs. But if you're being at all intimate over your school email, that's kinda on you.

Anyway surely Instructure only stores user public keys or something?

Alternate history question: If they just sold the data, never revealed the hack, and didn't make a scene, from a customer perspective, how different would this be from business as usual?

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#56
post #48

It's been a long time since I was in school. What does this software do?

It is how classes (even in person ones) are organized. Assignments, quizzes, links to online textbooks, discussion boards, student/teacher messaging, student group messaging, etc. From the teacher side, I'm not sure if there is a backup copy for things like grades outside of Canvas. It's that pervasive.

Everything from middle school up to grad school.

It's a particularly interesting time to have this happen too -- many finals going on now.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#57
I remember circa 2010 a friend of mine at college was like “blackboard sucks, let’s build something new”. At the time I poo pood the idea and lo and behold canvas came out a year later. Outside looking in, they been crushing it.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#58
My wife is in grad school at a major university and is dealing with this right now the week of midterms for spring quarter.

I totally understand why a university wouldn’t want to bake their own learning portals but just feels like such a single point of risk to use third party solutions for something like this.

Back in my day… all we had was a school email via on-premise services. I guess we registered for classes in a web portal but that’s about it. The idea of online class was entirely foreign at the time. Ain’t nobody hacking a blue book.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#59

I wonder when the public is going to start calling for corporate liability for malpractice in software development and corporate liability for malpractice in IT deployments. Even if the tech industry fights it, it probably won't be that much longer.

That is already happening in the EU [1][2]. Most of the world will catch up soon I suspect, with some notable exceptions.

[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cyber-resi... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_...

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like Canvas instances of schools not listed are also down (at least my alma mater is)

Yes, I work for an Australian online school. We’re down “for scheduled maintenance” (I question how “scheduled” it was given this is within school hours on a school day), but we’re not on the list published by ShinyHunters.

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