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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

#121

Post by gdhkgdhkvff »

sharkweek wrote: post #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…

It’s wild to me that people in this comment section are suggesting that schools should improve their security by rolling their own platform, which is bound to be filled with security holes, instead of using a popular, maintained, open source option.

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

#122

Post by smurda »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #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.

Blackboard, the Canvas predecessor, was so unstable that we called it BlackOutBoard

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

#123

Post by applfanboysbgon »

scheme271 wrote: post #118
Avicebron wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could also throw the CEOs of companies who don't properly secure their infrastructure and pay their security engineers enough in jail. A little justice on both ends.

Uh, who determines that the infrastructure wasn't properly secured? Who is willing to risk prison because some intern accidentally committed an API key or made a dumb mistake. Conversely, what's the chances that no one actually gets prosecuted regardless of how sloppy their security practices are?

> who determines that the infrastructure wasn't properly secured

An investigative body, the same kind that determines the who, the why, and the how when an airliner crashes or a bridge collapses. Obviously a lot of work needs to be done to get from point A to point B, and it won't happen overnight, but software development is currently a deeply unserious profession and at some point a genuine software engineering practice needs to be developed.

I am, perhaps naively, slightly hopeful that the LLM bullshit plaguing our industry will be the gust of wind needed for the house of cards to collapse and governments to realise that allowing the entire world to be vibe coded is not sustainable.

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

#124

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #112
parliament32 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be illegal It should be illegal to host insecure services, especially when you're dealing with PII. Breaches keep happening and nobody gives a fuck, because the worst that'll happen is you might lose a handful of customers and buy some "credit monitoring". Incidents like this should be followed by an audit and charges being laid. Send corp officers to jail for negligent security failures. If you can go to…

How could you possibly make it illegal to host insecure services? Is any service 100% secure? And if it were how would we know? I do agree with the audit and punishments for clear failure to adhere to established standards.

No building has a 100% chance of not caving in, yet somehow I think charges would be laid if a skyscraper caved in.

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

#125

Post by Avicebron »

scheme271 wrote: post #118
Avicebron wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could also throw the CEOs of companies who don't properly secure their infrastructure and pay their security engineers enough in jail. A little justice on both ends.

Uh, who determines that the infrastructure wasn't properly secured? Who is willing to risk prison because some intern accidentally committed an API key or made a dumb mistake. Conversely, what's the chances that no one actually gets prosecuted regardless of how sloppy their security practices are?

Ideally the chances are high to certain they get prosecuted for sloppy security practices. It's part of the gig of being a CEO, if you imagine you are such a visionary/ideas guy/leader/whatever, risk taker (always a risk taker) then you can gamble spending 20 to life because you weren't actually as good as you thought.

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

#126

Post by jrm4 »

Canvas shouldn't exist in its current form, and neither should have Blackboard.

It's always been as stupid as requiring that your chalkboard, chalk, chairs, bluebooks, pens, paper, gradebook etc etc all come from the same company.

I, for one, am very much looking forward to my IT Gov council meeting tomorrow.

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

#127

Post by corvad »

Canvas is handling this terrible. No communication, no status updates, etc. Also looks pretty bad their whole platform was compromised and not a single real report for the breach that already had happened. Wonder how long it will take for SLA violations and lawsuits to manifest, especially with most U.S. schooling having finals right now.

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

#128

Post by bawolff »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #112
parliament32 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be illegal It should be illegal to host insecure services, especially when you're dealing with PII. Breaches keep happening and nobody gives a fuck, because the worst that'll happen is you might lose a handful of customers and buy some "credit monitoring". Incidents like this should be followed by an audit and charges being laid. Send corp officers to jail for negligent security failures. If you can go to…

How could you possibly make it illegal to host insecure services? Is any service 100% secure? And if it were how would we know? I do agree with the audit and punishments for clear failure to adhere to established standards.

This is a solved problem in pretty much every other domain of life - if you are following best practises but something that wasn't reasonably forseeable happens, then you're fine, but if the bad thing happens as a result of negligence then you are in trouble.

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

#129

Post by bigyabai »

pants2 wrote: post #113
myrandomcomment wrote: post #89

1. It should be illegal for any company to pay ransomware attacks. Period. No pay out ever. 2. The penalty for being the attacker should be linked to the system they violated. If you do this to a hospital and someone dies you are life in prison / chair. The minimum sentence should be so painful that it deters the attack. No this will not stop this and companies need to be held accountable for their lack of security i…

When will countries start treating cyberattacks as an act of war? If the North Korean military came to America and robbed fort Knox of $200M in gold there would be retribution. But hack an American company for the same amount and the feds do nothing.

They already do. This is what asymmetric warfare looks like, your weakest links will break in a time of crisis. Focusing on retribution for the Dunder Mifflin cyberattack is pointless, the adversarial motivation is purely to disrupt and extort.

The best response to a cyberattack on critical systems is to take security seriously. Document the offense, avoid the same mistakes and invest in penetration testing. Of course, nobody is incentivized to do that until they're attacked, so the cycle perpetuates itself.

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

#130

Post by Kostchei »

bombcar wrote: post #99
myrandomcomment wrote: post #89

1. It should be illegal for any company to pay ransomware attacks. Period. No pay out ever. 2. The penalty for being the attacker should be linked to the system they violated. If you do this to a hospital and someone dies you are life in prison / chair. The minimum sentence should be so painful that it deters the attack. No this will not stop this and companies need to be held accountable for their lack of security i…

Your "minimum sentence so painful" will certainly dissuade foreign nationals, even foreign governments.

interestingly, having actually done the law enforcement side of these investigations, 50% of them are local. And I understand that this is not 100% solution, but neither is any form of law enforcement, but that doesn't mean we should fail to attempt it.

Kids from the local uni having a lark, stalkers, vindictive ex employees, local gangs, criminals who understand their victims because they hail from the same community. These are your local hackers. Sift them from the nation states and international crime groups, then deal with the International as a matter of diplomacy. Because we do this so poorly locally, we have little ammunition to when it comes to diplomacy. "reduce attacks by your crime groups and we buy your natural gas, seel you wheat etc"

Want more motivation?- 75% of the local attacks by volume send funds back to terrorist or separatist organizations.

It is not an in-soluble problem. Sentences are a fraction of the answer, effective and receptive reporting processes are more important, then government backing for investigation and enforcement, then policy around home-team activities (ie don't do the bad things yourselves Mr Gov). Deterrence comes after all that.

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