Rutgers Hit In Nationwide Hack Of Canvas Software; Hackers Demanded Money, Reports Say

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — Rutgers was one of thousands of American colleges and institutions hit this week in a cyber attack.

The attack happened Monday. A cyberhacker that goes by the name "ShinyHunters" hacked into Canvas, according to both Rutgers and Wired magazine. Canvas is the system Rutgers students and professors log onto to submit assignments and take exams.

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Wired reports ShinyHunters demanded money, paid in Bitcoin, from Instructure, which is the parent company that owns Canvas, in exchange for restoring access to the platform.

Instructure notified law enforcement, presumably the FBI, about the attack, and hired a third-party forensics firm to find out who is behind "ShinyHunters."

While the attack happened Monday, the system was still not entirely resolved as of Friday. As a result, most final exams remain suspended and assignments were canceled this week, Rutgers said in this series of emergency alerts it sent to everyone on campus.

While Instructure said Friday on their status page Canvas access has been restored, Rutgers is telling its students and staff to still stay off it.

Canvas access remains suspended at Rutgers as mid-day Friday.

"We are actively monitoring the global system outage impacting Canvas. Rutgers is evaluating next steps due to the interruption of Canvas during the exam period," Rutgers said in a school-wide notification sent out Thursday night. "The university understands that student exams, project submissions and other efforts may have been interrupted due to this incident. Thousands of institutions are dealing with this incident as well ... This was a nationwide data breach at Instructure."

Instructure called the hack "a widespread data breach affecting thousands of institutions." Rutgers said that while it does not think the passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers, or financial information of students were leaked in the attack, it is still "unclear what Rutgers data was involved, and Instructure’s investigation is ongoing."