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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

#211

Post by FloorEgg »

gchallen wrote: post #201
Gabriel54 wrote: post #190

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…

They have not succeeded in forcing me, yet. But it's sad how many computing faculty apparently can't operate the basic online infrastructure needed to support their courses. Not that universities make it easy for us. And of course the other serious concern I have with Canvas is that they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements. Many of my colleagues engage in dark humor about…

I'm sure the engineers at instructure are not capable of building systems that can do that. You give them too much credit.

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

#212

Post by e28eta »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #202
blahedo wrote: post #176

Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide…

> the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student with relevant records on completion of a quiz or whatnot. They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. (And universities don’t insist on it for who knows what reason.)

Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable.

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

#213

Post by Loughla »

Gabriel54 wrote: post #190

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…

[flagged]

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

#214

Post by protocolture »

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…

1. It should be illegal to run insecure services. Massive Fines.

2. The payout to the hackers should form part, but not all of the penalties. Pay those guys for their great service to humanity they earned it.

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

#215

Post by toraway »

prodigycorp wrote: post #119
pants2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, so we treat it as an act of war. Now what? Attack North Korea? Great, the entire city of Seoul gets shelled within five minutes of your attack and hundreds of thousands of innocent people die. It's very easy to play with lives that aren't yours.

Exactly. This is the "Declare fentanyl a WMD" of solutions to ransomware. Sounds kinda badass as long as you don't spend too long thinking about it but has no practical relevance to actual enforcement challenges.

It's a familiar example of the perennial "[THING] could be solved overnight if [PERSON_OR_GROUP] would just start taking [THING] seriously" trope.

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

#216

Post by incomplete »

i work tech at a university that's impacted by this. while it doesn't impact me directly, many many other staff and instructors i know are heavily affected by this outage. the students are absolutely outraged, mostly because the university hasn't been providing updates as quickly as they'd like, but since the staff/admin are waiting on word from instructure -- and there hasn't been a lot from them, it just generally sucks for all of us.

this is really, really, REALLY bad. it's not great that names/emails/etc will potentially be leaked, but also private messages between students and instructors. and since many of the campus systems rely on canvas integration, things have pretty much ground to a halt a week before finals.

after they were breached on the 1st of this month, instructure had an announcement yesterday that "everything is great! we're good! hackers are gone! we've rotated our keys!".

no. nothing is great. we are not good.

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

#217

Post by rupx »

blahedo wrote: post #176

Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide…

I work in the Education sector as IT. We don't know much else either.

Everything we know has come from reddit threads / hackernews threads. There has been 0 official communication today indicating this was an attack, yet the login page was defaced by ShinyHunters.

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

#218

Post by dumbfounder »

blahedo wrote: post #176

Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide…

Maybe a hybrid approach. Scramble to create a final exam/project and give them the option to do pass/fail or a real grade, their choice.

And then wish for the death of saas and a day where you can deploy your own software you can control and modify as you need.

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

#219

Post by dang »

Gabriel54 wrote: post #207
dang wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Comments were split across multiple threads and we've since merged them.)

Definitely not a criticism of your (hard) work here. Thank you!

Thanks! I just added that bit to pre-empt confusion - context-switches like this are one of those rug-pulling moments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041875).

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

#220

Post by dang »

altairprime wrote: post #209
Gabriel54 wrote: post #190

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…

Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though? I’m an extremely rare outlier afaik :) The administration has so far opened with one “Canvas said” and then an hour later one “Canvas is down indefinitely” email noting that they’re aware it’s serious. (Canvas is a glorified wiki for teaching students, with quizzes and such, for those unaware.)

> Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though?

That's my biggest fear.

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