An outage of the learning management platform used at FGCU called Canvas has been resolved, the university said Friday.
The Canvas system, used by thousands of schools and universities to support instruction, was back online Friday after it went down during a cyberattack that created chaos as students tried to study for final exams or prepare for the next educational term.
FGCU said it is monitoring the situation, and investigating whether any student, faculty or staff information was compromised.
FGCU also said all academic activities are planned to continue as scheduled.
The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said in an update late Thursday that the system was available for most users.
Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.
Screen shots Connolly provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data. By Friday, Instructure and Canvas had been removed from a dedicated leak site created by the ransomware group on the dark web to publish stolen data.
Canvas went down Thursday at the worst possible time. Students quickly took to social media, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.
Teachers said they were having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. And some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.
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