Finals season is stressful enough for many students.
But what happens when you can’t access your notes and lectures to study for those finals? That’s what happened to San Diego State University senior Selina Gonzalez, when the education platform Canvas went down Thursday.
“Every single note, every single lecture video, everything we need to study for our final is on Canvas," she said. "So while it was down for (Friday) morning and (Thursday), no one was able to study for it.”
In San Diego, the outage affected students at all levels, from community colleges and UC San Diego to California State University campuses and the San Diego Unified School District, among others.
When students logged on to the Canvas platform, they saw a message from the hacker group ShinyHunters threatening to release data unless Canvas’ parent company, Instructure, paid a ransom.
"They got names, they got emails, they got student IDs, and they got communications that go through a feature called Canvas Inbox," University of San Diego cybersecurity professor Nikolas Behar said. "So that includes communications between students and their professors."
Instructure said hackers exploited a vulnerability on Canvas' Free-For-Teacher accounts.
"As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-For-Teacher accounts," the company said.
But what concerns Behar is that no one knows yet how deep the breach was.
"We don't have all the information yet," he said. "So there is something going on inside their environment."
Canvas is now back up, but some schools, such as UC San Diego, are limiting access to Canvas. The university is advising students to avoid accessing Canvas until further notice.
Some students, he said, have received phishing emails asking for money or the hackers would release personal information.
"They're saying, 'If you don't pay us $2,000 in the next 48 hours, we're going to release data that we took from your browser, your browsing history.' Things like that," Behar said. "That is a scam. Ignore that any time you get an email."
During the outage, many professors weren’t able to contact students about course assignments and tests due. Some, like Jaclyn Siegel, found other ways to contact their students.
Seigel posted on the social media platform Reddit. She didn’t want her students to stress about their finals.
“But I was also sort of worried for me, who might have needed to respond to, you know, hundreds of emails," Seigel said. "And so I figured that given that the course is so large, there must be at least one person in my class who's on Reddit who can then provide the information to the other students.”
That seems to have worked for her class. At USD, freshman Jack Kelly said he found other ways to prepare for his finals, but his professors have also been accommodating.
“They were very supportive and very helpful dealing with the outage,” Kelly said.
With Canvas back up, students are breathing a sigh of relief and hoping this will be the only disruption during this stressful finals season.
