New details have emerged about a widespread cyber breach reportedly affecting 9,000 institutions worldwide, including UBC and SFU.
Both universities say they have been investigating since early afternoon Thursday when Instructure, parent company of the learning software Canvas Cloud, warned of a systems breach.
SFU says the compromised information that may have been involved “includes names, email addresses, student ID numbers and messages among Canvas users.”
UBC has warned users to log out and not log into Canvas until further notice. Users who logged in after noon on Thursday are advised to change their campus-wide login password and reach out to security@ubc.ca.
The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft.
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.
Screenshots 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.
In an update late Thursday, Instructure said the system was available for most users.
As of Friday morning, both SFU and UBC reported still being affected and continuing to monitor the situation.
—With files from Heather Hollingsworth, The Associated Press