WASHINGTON — A cyberattack has hit universities and schools across the United States, Canada and Australia, causing widespread chaos, confusion and major disruptions during year-end finals.
Hacking group Shiny Hunters has claimed responsibility for the attack, which knocked offline Canvas, the academic software used by thousands of schools and universities, this week.
Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said on its website Thursday that “Canvas is back up for most users.” However, some universities still reported service disruptions on Friday.
The cyberattack targeted universities and schools around the world, with an estimated 9,000 educational institutions affected.
Mississippi State University said it postponed Friday’s final exams to give affected students a chance to recover lost work.
Aubrey Palmer, a meteorology student at the university, told the BBC she had just finished a 2,900-word exam essay when the ransom note appeared on her screen.
The message read: “Shiny Hunters has once again breached Instructure’s security.”
It threatened that stolen data would be released unless Canvas or the affected universities paid a ransom in bitcoin.
“At first I thought I had been hacked because it looked just like that,” Palmer said. “But after reading the ransom note I realized Canvas itself had been hacked.”
She said she was with her professor and dozens of other students at the time. They all looked around and realized they had received the same message.
Initially, it was not clear whether their work had been saved. Frustration quickly spread among the students, and Palmer said she was “really upset at the thought of having to write the exam again.”
The university has since been providing regular email updates, setting new exam schedules and advising students to ignore suspicious messages in light of the “nationwide security incident.”
The University of Sydney told its students on Friday that “Canvas is unusable” and instructed them not to try to log in.
The university wrote on its website: “We are among about 9,000 institutions worldwide affected by this outage, and we are still awaiting guidance from Instructure.”
The university said the outage had affected students’ coursework and exams and acknowledged it as “extremely disruptive at this critical point in the semester.”
Idaho State University said Thursday that exams scheduled after noon local time had been canceled.
Penn State University told students Thursday that “no one can access Canvas” and that a solution was “unlikely within the next 24 hours.” The university canceled some exams on Thursday and Friday.
In an update Thursday evening, the University of British Columbia told students that Canvas was “down due to a cybersecurity breach” at parent company Instructure and advised them to log out quickly.
The University of Toronto said it had also been affected and added that “multiple universities have been affected.”
Meanwhile, students at the University of California, Los Angeles had trouble submitting online assignments through the Canvas platform.
The University of Chicago said it had temporarily taken down its Canvas page after receiving reports it had been targeted.
A screenshot published by The Chicago Maroon showed Shiny Hunters had sent a message demanding ransom.
The message called on the university to negotiate privately with the hacking group and warned against having “your data released.”
Jacques Abou-Rizk, a master’s student at Northwestern University, received a similar message. He said he saw the message after clicking a link in an email that appeared to be from a university administrator.
“I did not understand what was happening. Receiving such a message is really scary,” Abou-Rizk said.
He said the university sent a general email about the issue on Thursday, which the BBC has seen. It said Northwestern was “monitoring a matter.”
The email said the university did not know when Canvas would be restored and that other IT infrastructure had not been affected.
Abou-Rizk said he was still unable to access Canvas on Friday and had received no further messages from the university.
“It is not just about finishing my own work or accessing the Canvas sites I need,” he said. “It is also about what the real threat is and how it could affect me.”
“I do not know what data will be released, and that is what scares me.”
The BBC has contacted Northwestern University for comment.
Shiny Hunters has been linked to several other high-profile cyberattacks in the past. Among them was a major and financially damaging hack on Jaguar Land Rover last year.
Luke Connolly, an analyst at cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, told The Associated Press that according to the screenshots, the group’s targeted threats began Sunday with deadlines running through Thursday and May 12.
He said ransom negotiations may still be ongoing. The group has not yet said what it plans to do in the future with the data it claims to have stolen in the recent attacks.
The Thursday cyberattacks came as Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to the Trump administration calling for stronger defenses against cyber risks in the rapidly developing age of artificial intelligence.
Schumer wrote that the Department of Homeland Security must “immediately assist state and local authorities.”
“Americans must take action before they fall victim to such disruptions, dislocations and attacks that can put lives and livelihoods at risk,” he said.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report