Officials say millions of student and educator records may have been compromised.
SAN ANTONIO — A major cybersecurity attack targeting the educational platform Canvas is causing disruptions at colleges and schools across the country — including in San Antonio.
The company behind Canvas, Instructure, confirmed that hackers accessed sensitive information tied to millions of students, teachers and staff members.
According to the company, exposed data may include names, email addresses, student ID numbers and private messages between users.
A criminal extortion group has claimed responsibility for the attack, alleging it stole roughly 275 million records and threatening to leak the information if demands are not met.
While Instructure says most Canvas services are now back online, the outage has already impacted finals week at local universities.
The University of Texas at San Antonio announced it is rescheduling finals and assignments affected by the disruption, assuring students the outage will not negatively impact grades.
Schreiner University also confirmed the platform outage affected coursework and said alternate plans for students are being communicated.
KENS 5 has reached out to additional area school districts and universities to determine whether they were also impacted.
Northside ISD released this statement:
Northside ISD is aware of the global security breach affecting Instructure, the developer of the Canvas learning management system (LMS). While the district utilizes Schoology as our primary LMS rather than Canvas, we are currently investigating whether any associated programs used in the district are affected. At this time, we are not aware of any direct impact to NISD; however, we are continuing to monitor the situation. Rest assured that if we discover any potential security threats to the district or to our students’ personal information, we will take appropriate action to respond.”
The investigation into the cyberattack remains ongoing.