By Hailey Cylinder Full360 Multimedia Reporter

Late last night, students all over the world were opening Canvas to be faced with either an error screen or ransom messages.  A group called ShinyHunters is claiming responsibility for taking down Instructure, the host of the Canvas platform.  Serving universities and K-12 schools, this is a major interruption, especially during finals week 

Here at DelVal, students who try to open Canvas are shown a screen stating that they are down for general maintenance.  So far, Information Technology Services has sent out an email informing students that Canvas is down and that they are unsure of the timeline or extent of the incident. UPDATE: As of this morning, Canvas was reported officially back up at 8:00 am. In addition, the group ShinyHunters posted a file containing all of the schools that were targeted in this attack, DelVal being one of them. 

On May 1st, Steve Proud, Chief Information Security Officer for Instructure, posted a statement on their website, “Instructor recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor,” followed by “The information involved consists of certain identifying information of users at affected institutions, such as names, email addresses, and student ID numbers,” released on May 2nd.