Government to Scrutinize Instructure Over Canvas Disruption, Data Breach

The US House Committee on Homeland Security is demanding answers from Instructure after hackers attacked its Canvas learning platform twice in early May, allegedly stealing 3.65 terabytes of data affecting 275 million students and teachers across about 9,000 schools. The notorious ShinyHunters extortion group claimed responsibility for the breach, which forced Instructure to shut down services multiple times, disrupting students during final exams at more than 8,000 institutions across 11 states. Instructure says it has now paid to have the stolen data returned and erased, and has temporarily disabled the Free-For-Teacher accounts that were exploited in the attacks.