Finals week exams at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will begin Sunday following a delay triggered by a global attack on the online learning system used by universities across the country.
University officials late Saturday morning announced in a message to students, faculty and staff that access to the Canvas system had been restored, with all exams originally scheduled for Friday taking place on Sunday, with all exam times and locations remaining unchanged.
Course instructors will be able to assign a new due date for final assignments, projects, or other final evaluations that were originally due on Friday or Saturday, university officials said.
Northwestern University in Evanston, which also uses Canvas, stated in an online post that some access to the system was available, while other parts remained unavailable.
Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said late Thursday that the system was available for most users.
U of I and Northwestern were among the thousands of universities that experienced problems after an apparent global attack on the Canvas system
Schools and universities use Canvas to manage nearly all aspects of instruction. The platform acts as a gradebook, a hub for digital lectures and course materials, a discussion board for classroom projects, and a messaging platform between students and instructors.
A cybersecurity threat analyst says a hacking group called ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for breaching Canvas. An expert said the hackers posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed. Teachers had to find work-arounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments, and some schools pushed back finals.
ShinyHunters is a loose association of teenage and young adult hackers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom who have been linked to other large-scale cyberattacks, including one on Ticketmaster, Connolly said. On the page listing their targets, the group describes itself as “rooting your systems since ‘19,” using a term for accessing a computer system’s deepest layer.
The Associated Press contributed.
