Provost Brent Thomas is urging students to proceed with caution when accessing Emporia State’s Canvas portal following a cybersecurity incident involving the platform and its parent company, Instructure, Thursday afternoon.
“Canvas is back online. While service has returned, students should use caution at this time,” Thomas said in a Friday email announcement to students. “Be aware that Canvas could become unavailable at any time. If you encounter suspicious or unexpected behavior in Canvas, notify IT Security or contact the IT Help Desk.”
Around 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, ESU Information Technology alerted students that Canvas was unavailable as part of a larger outage affecting universities nationwide. The platform went back online around 10 p.m. Thursday evening, but ESU IT asked users to stay off of the site until they received confirmation from Instructure that its system was “fully restored and stable.” ESU IT is “no longer restricting access” to Canvas, Thomas told The Bulletin.
The cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the Thursday hacking incident in a popup message that appeared on student Canvas pages at universities across the nation. The message directed affected universities to “negotiate a settlement” with ShinyHunters or risk a leak of stolen sensitive data. The group gave universities and Instructure a May 12 compliance deadline. It is still not known whether ESU and its Canvas data were targets of the breach.
Thomas encouraged students to download any materials from Canvas that they may need in case Canvas goes offline again as finals week approaches.
“If there are updates or changes to your finals or assignments, you will receive an email from your instructor in your student email,” he said.
ESU will continue to monitor the Canvas situation and communicate additional information to students as needed via email. The university is in the process of creating a resource website for updates and FAQs regarding Canvas, Thomas said.
