The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History: Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech
Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas.
Later Thursday, Instructure, which makes Canvas, was able to mostly put Canvas back online; it is not clear if the company paid a ransom or not. The breach demonstrates the danger in centralizing the educational and personal data of millions of students in a single service. Canvas is essentially a portal where teachers post assignments and lectures, have discussion boards, and students can message with each other and their teachers and connect with other pieces of education tech software.
Instructure noted on an incident update page that the stolen data includes “certain personal information of users at affected organizations.” That includes names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among Canvas users. Instructure also noted that it was breached twice—once on April 29 and again on Thursday.
Soon after the hack, I called up Ian Linkletter, a digital librarian specializing in emerging education tech. Linkletter has worked in education tech for 20 years and over the last few years has become known for exposing privacy concerns in Proctorio, a remote test proctoring software that rose to prominence during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Linkletter was sued by Proctorio but eventually the case was dropped.
Linkletter told me the Canvas hack is “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history” in part because of its scale and the sensitive nature of what was stolen. This is my conversation with Linkletter, which has been lightly condensed:
404 Media: What do we know about the hack so far?
Linkletter: At about 1:20 PM [Pacific, Thursday], people started posting screenshots to Reddit of this breach message that they got. Some institutions were cautioning people to change their passwords if they were logged in; right now it just seems like people are in panic mode, some senior administration at schools are in meetings talking about whether they need to cancel finals next week. It’s just the implications are on everything because schools are reliant on this learning management system for everything—communications, grading, finals, everything.
404 Media: What do you mean by “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history”? How does that compare to other breaches?
Linkletter: I supported Blackboard [a similar piece of tech] way back in the day, and I supported Canvas from about 2017 to 2022 when I worked at the University of British Columbia. And what I was there for when we switched to Canvas in 2017 was the shift from these scrappy little self-hosted learning management system apps that would be on Canadian servers to this centralized, all eggs-in-one basket faith in a U.S. tech company. This idea that our data would be just as safe with them as it was when we had it. And because this move to the cloud happened so suddenly about 10 years ago, all of a sudden data got centralized. The only way that I can think of that this type of hack where everything went down, where so much was stolen would be if Instructure had access to everybody’s data, which doesn’t seem necessary. For it to be just so widespread across every customer is something that, like, [we’ve] never seen before.
404 Media: What will you be kind of monitoring as this plays out?
Linkletter: My biggest concern right now is monitoring the institutional response. I feel very strongly that students should have been warned about this like days ago. And it just took this second hack where students got something in their face notifying them that really made schools respond. So I believe that students need to be warned or else they’re going to get harmed. And the longer schools wait to tell students about what’s going on, even the little that they know, the more stress and chaos and potential risk to student privacy and safety is at stake.
Key Takeaways
- The Canvas hack represents a significant breach of millions of students’ data with serious implications for privacy and security.
- This incident highlights the dangers of centralized educational technology platforms, which can expose sensitive information to broader risks.
- Ian Linkletter, an expert in education tech, emphasized that this breach is unprecedented in scale and severity, potentially exposing personal details including student IDs and messages between students and teachers.
Originally published at 404media.co. Curated by AI Maestro.
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