District recommends three-prong approach to stall global Canvas cyberattack

The attack perpetrated by the group ShinyHunters led to mass Canvas outages worldwide

By Michel Melichar and Daimler Koch, Staff Writers

Valley cybersecurity personnel are encouraging students to be cautious as students and teachers return to online classes on the heels of a nationwide Canvas hack, a platform used by nearly 9,000 educational institutions worldwide.

Security officials at LACCD recommend students and teachers take the following precautions in lieu of the potential leak: “Treat Canvas messages as suspicious, change your password(s) and turn on two-factor authentication.”

Perpetrated by the hacker group known as ShinyHunters, students logging onto Canvas on May 7

were greeted by a message that read: 

“If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement. You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked.”

The message was accompanied by a text document of affected schools along with a .onion address linking to the hacker group’s dark-web site. 

Students nationwide were locked out of Canvas starting that Thursday, with some reporting access to the educational site on Thursday evening and others not until Sunday night.

Some students reported being able to access the platform via the Canvas app, though crucially, administrative services were not functional during the outage’s duration. 

Gianmarco Razuri, a film student who works at the ESL office, found out that Canvas went down when he and his coworkers tried logging in to the portal to help students enroll.

“I work at the ESL office. I enroll students, so I have to, like, log into the portal. 
And it wasn't working,” said Gianmarco Razuir, a film student. And then my coworker tried it. It wasn't working for them. 
My other coworker tried, but it wasn't working on their computer. So, like, what's wrong? And then my friend sent me a message, and he was like, ‘Oh, like, Canvas got hacked.’”

According to estimates by the Valley Star, roughly 1,600 schools nationwide use Canvas as their main education platform. Schools like MIT, Columbia University, the UCs, the CSUs and the LACCD were affected.

The attack hit many universities as they were headed in for finals.