(7 May 2026) Australasian universities are scrambling to determine whether they have been directly affected by a cyberattack on the Canvas learning management system which has compromised information security at up to 9,000 educational institutions around the globe.
The platform’s vendor, Utah-based edtech company Instructure, reported on 1 May that it had “experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor”.
The hackers – a group known as “ShinyHunters”, previously linked with data theft from Ticketmaster and Google as well as the universities of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Harvard – threatened to leak “billions of private messages” unless the company paid an undisclosed ransom by 6 May, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Instructure said the incident appeared to have been “resolved” by 6 May, with Canvas now “fully operational” and no signs of “ongoing unauthorized activity”. But the hackers had potentially obtained data from the tens of millions of Canvas users at the company’s 8,000-plus customers, including top global universities and “every Ivy League school”.
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