South Florida schools impacted by Canvas system cyberattack

Canvas, a system that thousands of schools and universities use, including institutions in South Florida, was offline Thursday during a cyberattack.

Broward County Public Schools posted on X that the system’s access was blocked districtwide to protect its data.

Florida International University also alerted students that Canvas would be unavailable due to the cybersecurity incident.

“The university’s cybersecurity team remains engaged with Instructure and is closely monitoring developments. Please be aware of potential phishing attempts offering to recover access to your Canvas data,” the university said in a statement on its website.

The cyberattack created chaos as students tried to study for finals and underscores education’s dependence on technology.

The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Instructure, the company behind the learning management system 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.

Screen shots he provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing.