Hackers block access to platform used by thousands of US schools

US universities including Harvard, Stanford and thousands of other institutions were hit by a massive cyber hack on Thursday following an earlier data breach.

The attack, claimed by ShinyHunters, a well-known cyber extortion group active since at least 2019, saw access to the Canvas learning platform blocked.

According to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper and posts on social media, students attempting to access the system on Thursday saw a message from the hacking group saying servers belonging to Canvas's parent company Instructure had "again" been breached.

"Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches,'" the hackers said.

"If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately...to negotiate a settlement."

The group warned it would release all stolen data if schools did not make contact by May 12.

The message included a link to a list of schools ShinyHunters claims to have breached through Canvas.

Stanford University said Canvas was "currently unavailable due to an issue being experienced by the vendor," adding that Instructure had recently disclosed a nationwide information security issue it said had been contained.

But a further outage was now affecting Canvas customers including Stanford and "numerous other educational institutions nationwide," the university added.

Instructure said the stolen data in the original breach included personal details such as names, email addresses and student ID numbers, along with private messages exchanged between users.