Updated May 10
TCC sent out an email late Friday afternoon confirming Canvas is up and running again.
“Canvas is now operational and is available for all users online and through the mobile app,” the email said.
No further details were given.
TCC officials say a nationwide “cybersecurity incident” caused students and faculty to lose access to Canvas on Thursday afternoon, the first day of final exams.
Around 3:30 p.m. students reported seeing a message from the cybercriminal group ShinyHunters when they tried to open Canvas, which is managed by Instructure.
The message stated “ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches’.”
Later in the message ShinyHunters gave a link to a list of schools being threatened, including TCC. They state that in order for the information not to be leaked, the schools need to reach out by May 12 to pay and be protected.
The outage has affected colleges and universities across the country, including Harvard, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania.
On May 3, ShinyHunters announced that they had breached Instructure and claimed to have stolen data from 275 million affiliates across 9,000 schools around the globe. The group gave Instructure and affected schools a May 6 deadline to respond to their demands.
In an AlertAware email sent to students, the college stated that there is no evidence that personal information like passwords or social security numbers were compromised.
“Canvas is not connected to TCC data sources – this remains an isolated incident,” the email said.
The college stated that the IT team is “thoroughly assessing the security incident’s impact on the College community” and will continue to monitor the situation.
In the meantime, students and staff are worried about how the situation will impact finals.
South student Diana Parga said that she has assignments due and she needs to study with materials that are on Canvas.
“If I don’t complete those assignments quickly, I’ll probably end up with less time to study,” she wrote in a message to The Collegian on Instagram. “I just hope my teacher understands why I’m taking [too] long to complete those assignments.”
NE instructional associate Cory Bayle said the outage is already impacting final exams.
“It’s going to affect the grading, for sure. In fact, we have an Audio I class at 6:30 p.m. tonight, and the test is on Canvas,” Bayle said. “We don’t even know if we can proctor the test.”
The test has since been pushed to next week, according to Bayle.
NE student Monica Coppola said she’s worried about more than her grades.
“I think it’s scary because I don’t know how much information they took,” she said. “I have good grades so I’m not too worried about it, but mainly [I’m concerned more about] my personal, private information.”
Campus Editor Matt Penrod contributed to this article.
