International cyber attack disrupts swathe of universities and schools

International cyber attack disrupted universities and schools this week in the US, Canada and Australia. The hacking group ShinyHunters reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, which caused the academic software Canvas to go offline. Instructure, which owns Canvas, posted an update on its website saying that Canvas was "available for most users", but some universities were still reporting outages on Friday.

The cyber attacks affected an estimated 9,000 institutions. The University of Sydney told students on Friday, "Canvas was unavailable", and instructed students not to attempt to log in, adding, "We are one of approximately 9000 institutions around the world that are impacted by this outage, and we are still waiting for advice from Instructure." Mississippi State University announced that it was postponing Friday's final exams. Idaho State University said it had cancelled exams scheduled after 12:00 local time (18:00 GMT) on Thursday. Penn State University wrote in a message to students on Thursday that "no one has access" to Canvas, adding that a "resolution" was unlikely to arrive "within the next 24 hours" and cancelled some exams scheduled for Thursday and Friday. The University of British Columbia in Vancouver informed students that Canvas was "unavailable due to a cyber breach of its parent company, Instructure" and advised them to log out immediately. The University of Toronto also reported being affected by the breach, saying that "multiple universities were affected".

The Chicago Maroon posted a screenshot of a message from ShinyHunters that appeared to be a ransom demand, encouraging the university to contact the hacking group privately "to negotiate a settlement" and avoid "the release of their data". Northwestern University master's student Jacques Abou-Rizk said he received the same message when he clicked a link in an email that appeared to be from a university administrator. **Abou-Rizk