Thousands of U.S. Schools Hacked As Finals Loom: What To Know In IL

A cyberattack on a system used by thousands of public schools and universities, including some in Illinois, threw students into chaos Thursday as final exams loomed.

The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, a grade and curriculum management tool that stores sensitive files. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft, told The Associated Press.

Among the schools dealing with the breach is Northwestern University. In a 1:30 p.m. Friday post, administration at the Evanston school reported its IT department has regained access to the system to prepare Canvas for reconnection.

"Other internal validation steps continue to make good progress," Northwestern said in the post. "We will communicate with the campus community by email later this afternoon with more details on an expected reconnection date and time window."

Officials said Canvas remains unavailable to the Northwestern community. Instructors seeking solutions for continuing classes without Canvas are being directed to a website for assistance.

"Our discussions with peer institutions, security experts, and the vendor will also continue as we prepare to reconnect Canvas in a way that protects both personal and institutional data," Northwestern administration said, adding that the next update is scheduled for 4 p.m. Friday.

Meanwhile, all exams and assignments scheduled for the weekend at the University of Illinois are being postponed due to the "ongoing" cybersecurity incident.

"We are awaiting information from Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, as to when the service will become available again," the school said in a post regarding the situation. "Until the vendor can solve this problem, course materials will be unavailable. This issue is affecting universities across the country."

Members of university leadership are discussing next steps, with sensitivity to the impacts on students and instructors during the final exam period," according to the post.

Schools in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin reported issues, CNN reported.

Columbia University, Rutgers, Princeton, Kent State, Harvard and Georgetown were among the universities issuing statements alerting students to the hack impacting institutions nationwide.

Instructure, the company behind Canvas, didn't immediately respond to The AP’s request for comment or questions about whether the system was taken down as a precaution or because the hackers knocked it offline. The company has not posted about the attack on its social media.

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.

When they discovered the system was offline Thursday, students quickly took to social media to ask if others were unable to access Canvas, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.

Teachers say they are having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments.

Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a post on the social media platform X that his students had been relying on Canvas to access every reading from the semester and all of his lecture slides before their Monday final exams. The outage leaves students and faculty "dead in the water here in academia right now," he said.

The student newspaper at Harvard reported that the system there was down as well. Students at Johns Hopkins University simply got an error message when trying to view their final grades on the platform Thursday. And public school districts also sought to reassure parents, with officials in Spokane, Washington, writing that they aren't "aware of any sensitive data contained in this breach."

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.

The hackers began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12, according to screenshots Connolly provided to The AP. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing.

Rich in digitized data, the nation's schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Connolly said the Canvas attack is strikingly similar to a breach at PowerSchool, which also offers learning management tools. In that case a Massachusetts college student was charged.

Connolly described ShinyHunters as a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The group also has been tied to other attacks, including one aimed at Live Nation's Ticketmaster subsidiary.

Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents.

"This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident," the director of information technology at the University of Iowa's College of Public Health wrote in announcing that the school's online system was down. "Hopefully we will have a resolution soon."

Virginia Tech acknowledged in a notice to students that the administration was aware of the effect on final exams and other end-of-semester activities. The University of New Mexico sent a similar message to the campus community, and the University of Florida urged students to stay alert for any phishing messages that appear to be from Canvas.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.