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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

#241

Post by gruez »

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…

> If you do this to a hospital and someone dies you are life in prison / chair.

If you're going to get the chair you might as well murder some witnesses or destroy some systems to hide the fact you got hacked. "Hack? What hack? Our servers all burned down in an arson attack".

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

#242

Post by isityettime »

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…

What? What makes Canvas accessible in a way that HTML and PDF files are not? It's true that PDF readers aren't the best for screenreaders, but surely you can just upload a .html copy as well.

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

#243

Post by eiiot »

I'm a student at Stanford — this is hitting the whole school hard. Unlike a lot of schools on the east coast that are affected (Brown, Harvard, MIT) we are on the quarter system so we're just ending Midterms right now. We're also lucky enough to have our CS department entirely independent from Canvas, but most of my humanities classes are not so lucky. One art history class is having us submit our midterm papers by uploading to a google drive folder—another is pausing weekly quizzes. The main thing this has revealed is just how dependent students and teachers are on Canvas... I hope that this re-prompts discussions about moving off of a platform that was already (from a student perspective) not very good.

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

#244

Post by sieve »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #124
phainopepla2 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The equivalent analogy is charging lock/door/drywall/timber makers and suppliers for lapses if a thief entered the house by picking a lock or drilling/sawing through the wall.

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

#245

Post by Telaneo »

Great. More data gone astray. Given Canvas' handling of the situation, I doubt they're going to learn much.

The timing probably isn't a coincidence. Great time to stress out students and staff alike. Hopefully it doesn't affect them too much in the end, but I imagine it will.

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

#247

Post by Avicebron »

dumbfounder wrote: post #218
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.

What is the strategic response then? Assuming I'm a student and my grades are gone, and I want to graduate, shouldn't I pick pass/fail?

Does a future employer look at pass/fail vs the grade? do they care? Are there even jobs that matter enough to care out there for them?

This seems like, solving the problem but without actually seeing the broader goal or trajectory education is supposed to follow.

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

#248

Post by MarsIronPI »

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.)

Makes me glad I've always avoided doing my work on web platforms. When we used to have to make presentations in Google Slides I used to do them in Org-mode, then export to Sheets. I still have all those assignments sitting on my disk. Sure, there's versions of them on Google Drive, but I always make sure that the canonical version is the one on my disk.

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

#249

Post by rigrassm »

starkrights wrote: post #47
incomplete wrote: post #10

yep, i work for a major university and our canvas instance is down. this is really, really bad. edit: here's the list of impacted universities (unsure if they all have their canvas instances offline, but i'd be surprised if not): http://91.215.85.103/pay_or_leak/instructure_affected_school...

The source txtfile has since either been dos'd or deleted (at least it was when I tried to access) Someone dumped the content into a google doc on reddit[1] if anyone's interested. [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MTktVSwTUM5I_w7bKNGj94sT...

> The source txtfile has since either been dos'd or deleted (at least it was when I tried to access)

> Someone dumped the content into a google doc on reddit[1] if anyone's interested.

> [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MTktVSwTUM5I_w7bKNGj94sT...

Thanks for linking this. Ended up finding my kids school district on the list unfortunately.

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

#250

Post by MarsIronPI »

dang wrote: post #191
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…

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

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