When Audrey Cox, junior, opened Canvas on Thursday, May 14 to start studying for her pre-calculus quiz, she was shocked to find out that the site was down. Cox was planning on finishing up her homework and was concerned about not being able to get it done without the answer keys on Canvas.
On Thursday, May 7, at 3:45 p.m., Canvas, Rockwood’s learning management system, was hacked by ShinyHunters. Rockwood officials notified students and staff of this incident at 4:35 p.m., and Canvas was unavailable from 3:45 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. the following day.
“I’m definitely a procrastinator, and I did not have all my homework done,” Cox said.
However, Cox was relieved to see that her math teacher, Katherine Schroeder, had sent her the materials she needed through Infinite Campus.
“I had some other stuff I had to get done, but I just reopened all my old tabs from the entire day and hoped whatever I needed was in there, and it worked,” Cox said.
Cox said the hack might be a wake-up call for some teachers.
“You can’t be entirely reliant on Canvas, and you have to have other resources available,” Cox said. “I think it definitely caused some people some stress, but luckily, they were able to get it back up pretty quickly.”
The initial threat began on Saturday, May 2, said Bob Deneau, Chief Information Officer, when Canvas notified its customers that Canvas was experiencing a cybersecurity issue, but Rockwood was unaffected at the time.
However, on Tuesday, May 5, at 4:00 p.m., Canvas notified Rockwood officials that the cybersecurity issue would impact the district.
On Saturday, May 2, Canvas notified customers of a cybersecurity problem, and according to Chief Information Officer Bob Deneau, Rockwood was unaffected during that first alert.
That changed on Tuesday, May 5, at 4:00 p.m., when Canvas contacted Rockwood directly to say the issue would affect the district.
The hacker group, ShinyHunters, claimed to have breached data for 275 million users and billions of private messages from Canvas, setting a May 6 deadline for impacted schools to negotiate, according to CNN.
“The issue has been global, especially across a lot of higher education institutions that use Canvas,” Deneau said. “The hacker was able to display a new landing page for some institutions, and it included a list of their demands, basically saying that ‘if you don’t want your data leaked, here’s how you can contact us, and we can negotiate a price for it.’”
Canvas went offline when they realized there was an attack, which is when the Rockwood School District was notified of a maintenance issue from the website, Deneau said.
If this type of threat were to happen in the future and demands were made from the Rockwood School District, district officials have an incident response plan to alleviate the situation.
“We would need to gather and communicate and try to make a plan as to how to control whatever situation we’re presented with. There is no one way to handle it, but having an instant response plan gives us guidance for any high-stress situation like this,” Deneau said.
After cybersecurity incidents like this, Deneau said, the district expects to see targeted phishing emails about Canvas to students at impacted institutions.
“If an email seems like they’re asking for too much, definitely question that and potentially reach out to the technology department to see if it is a legitimate email,” Deneau said.
For Kathleen Drissell, American Sign Language teacher, Canvas being down got in the way of putting in grades after school.
“I knew there was some type of glitch at first because my husband, he works in another district, and they didn’t have that working for like over a week now, so I kind of figured there was something wrong,” Drissell said.
When Drissell logged into Canvas at around 3:45 p.m., the screen displayed a “down for scheduled maintenance” message.
Drissell posts signing practice and comprehension in Canvas, which her students were briefly unable to access until she sent out a message through Infinite Campus.
“I was even thinking about what the next two weeks of school would look like if we didn’t have Canvas at all, so that was kind of terrifying,” Drissell said.
