{"id":692,"date":"2026-05-12T18:35:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T18:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=692"},"modified":"2026-05-12T18:35:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T18:35:20","slug":"cyberattack-hits-canvas-system-used-by-cherry-creek-thousands-of-us-schools-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=692","title":{"rendered":"Cyberattack hits Canvas system used by Cherry Creek, thousands of US schools"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

AURORA<\/strong> | Tens of thousands of students studying for final exams around the world Friday regained access to a key online learning system after a cyberattack knocked it offline, throwing schools and universities into chaos.<\/p>\n

Cherry Creek schools Elevation program was affected, school officials said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur impact was that the Canvas system was put into maintenance mode yesterday and unavailable for our students to complete their work,\u201d Cherry Creek schools spokesperson Lauren Snell said in a statement. \u201cWe have confirmed that Cherry Creek Elevation was on the attackers\u2019 list. However, it is currently unclear what, if any, Canvas student data was breached. \u201c<\/p>\n

Snell said the district is working with Canvas officials and waiting for details about the attack.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The district sent a message to Elevation students and families informing them about the attack.<\/p>\n

Aurora Public Schools officials were not immediately available for comment.<\/p>\n

Community College of Aurora officials said the college does not use Canvas and was unaffected.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe use Desire2Learn as our learning management software,\u201d CCA spokesperson Courtney Butler said in a statement Friday about the Aurora school and all parts of the state\u2019s community college system. \u201cLuckily, none of our 13 community colleges were hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

A hacking group called ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said in an update late Thursday that the system was available for most users.<\/p>\n

Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.<\/p>\n

Screenshots Connolly provided showed that the group had been threatening to leak the trove of data. By Friday, Instructure and Canvas had been removed from a dedicated leak site created by the ransomware group on the dark web to publish stolen data, he said.<\/p>\n

Canvas went down Thursday at the worst possible time, which came as no surprise to Huseyin Can Yuceel, the security research lead at Picus Labs.<\/p>\n

\u201cTiming is everything, because they want to inflict pain as much as possible,\u201d he said, \u201cso they can extort money out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rich in digitized data, the nation\u2019s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.<\/p>\n

Instructure has not posted about the attack on its social media. The company didn\u2019t immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press asking whether it paid a ransom and inquiring about what happened with the compromised data.<\/p>\n

Students quickly took to social media, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.<\/p>\n

Teachers said they were having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. And some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.<\/p>\n

Schools like Princeton University turned to the social platform X late Thursday to announce that Canvas appeared to be working and information technology staff was monitoring the situation.<\/p>\n

Rhongho Jang, a computer science professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, was finalizing grades for a class of 94 students when the system went down. He keeps paper copies of the student exams, but all of the semester assignments were done online.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s 50% weight for the final grading,\u201d Jang said.<\/p>\n

If those assignments and grades could not be recovered, Jang would have given his students full credit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want to penalize them,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot judge based on the data we don\u2019t have. The final responsibility is still on the server.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he was sure the data was saved and would be recovered, Jang was relieved when Canvas came back up.<\/p>\n

Allan Liska, of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said the outage did appear deliberate, not a glitch, and that Instructure was trying to figure out how widespread the problem was and make sure the hackers were no longer inside its system.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no indication at this point that any ransom has been paid,\u201d Liska said. \u201cAnd it likely is still a little too early for a ransom to have been paid. You know, normally these negotiations kind of drag on for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n

Liska said nothing big has been leaked yet, but said that is common. \u201cOnce they\u2019ve leaked, they\u2019ve lost their leverage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Connolly said the Canvas attack is strikingly similar to a breach at PowerSchool, which also offers learning management tools. In that case, a Massachusetts college student was charged.<\/p>\n

Connolly described ShinyHunters as a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The group also has been tied to other attacks, including Live Nation\u2019s Ticketmaster subsidiary.<\/p>\n

ShinyHunters, or an offshoot, also was behind a previous smaller breach of Instructure, Liska said. He added that the group or someone pretending to be ShinyHunters issued a statement Friday indicating that it had nothing to say.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very weird,\u201d Liska said, noting that the group is \u201cnormally a very talkative bunch.\u201d<\/p>\n

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AURORA | Tens of thousands of students studying for final exams around the world Friday regained access to a key online learning system after a cyberattack knocked it offline, throwing schools and universities into chaos. Cherry Creek schools Elevation program was affected, school officials said. \u201cOur impact was that the Canvas system was put into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[470,471,472,473,474,475,476,477,478],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-metro","tag-allan-liska","tag-canvas","tag-community-college-of-aurora","tag-emsisoft","tag-huseyin-can-yuceel","tag-instructure","tag-luke-connolly","tag-rhongho-jang","tag-shinyhunters"],"yoast_head":"\nCyberattack hits Canvas system used by Cherry Creek, thousands of US schools - Denver Moving Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=692\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cyberattack hits Canvas system used by Cherry Creek, thousands of US schools - Denver Moving Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"AURORA | Tens of thousands of students studying for final exams around the world Friday regained access to a key online learning system after a cyberattack knocked it offline, throwing schools and universities into chaos. 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