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PBS News Hour - Segments

Cyberattack on Canvas platform highlights vulnerabilities and risks for schools

PBS News Hour - Segments

PBS NewsHour

News, Daily News

4.11K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The online education platform Canvas is mostly back online Friday after a cyberattack left students and teachers at thousands of schools and universities scrambling. The attack has raised many questions about the vulnerability of schools, the dependence on such platforms and other risks. Ali Rogin speaks with threat intelligence analyst Luke Connolly about those concerns. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0

The online education platform Canvas is mostly back online today after a cyber attack left students and teachers at thousands of schools and universities scrambling.

0:10.0

More than 8,000 schools at every level, including colleges and universities across the world, use Canvas to submit assignments, access course materials, and manage grades.

0:20.0

The outage came at one of the worst possible times, forcing some universities to delay final exams.

0:26.6

The cyber attack has raised many questions about schools' vulnerability, the dependence on such platforms, and other risks.

0:33.6

Allie Rogan zeroes in on those concerns.

0:35.6

Allie?

0:36.6

That's right. Canvas's parent company in structure says it detected an initial breach on April 29th,

0:43.3

before a second hack yesterday brought Canvas fully offline.

0:47.3

A group called Shiny Hunters claimed responsibility, reportedly threatening to leak billions of private messages and other records,

0:55.2

giving a deadline of this Sunday to negotiate a settlement.

0:59.4

Instructure says Canvas is now back online,

1:02.0

and it will continue to monitor the situation,

1:04.3

but the incident raises questions about our educational systems,

1:08.2

reliance on technology, and what happens when that technology becomes

1:11.8

a liability. For more, I'm joined by Luke Connolly, a threat intelligence analyst at MCSoft,

1:17.4

a cybersecurity firm. Luke, thank you so much for joining us. We know that this is still a very

1:22.5

fluid situation, but what do we know so far about how this hack unfolded? Well, as you said, it seems to have taken place at the end of April.

1:32.3

There are a number of techniques that these cyber criminals use in order to gain access.

1:37.3

But once they gained access, they apparently started exfiltrating or downloading stealing data from the customers of

1:49.0

Instructure, which are universities and school boards across North America.

1:54.0

So there are universities and schools affected in the United States, affecting Canada and beyond as well.

2:00.0

And from the dark website, which is maintained by the criminal group Shiny Hunters, they made

...

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