A Blank Canvas

Forget the old my dog ate my homework excuse for not getting one’s work to the teacher in time. Today’s high school and college students have a much more modern pretext to explain away a missing assignment: My homework was taken hostage and held for ransom. That’s pretty much what took place across thousands of schools (where AP tests are being administered) and universities (where some finals are scheduled), as a hacking group known as ShinyHunters breached an online learning platform called Canvas, that “is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed.” Canvas’ parent company Infrastructure took the service offline as the hackers demanded a ransom to keep the accessed data from being released.
Both of my kids, one in college and one in high school, were affected by the hack. During their academic lives, they’ve already missed school because of a global pandemic, unsafe smoke levels, wildfires, and flooding, so a hack impacting 9,000 institutions seemed like a relatively minor interruption. But the incident does point to the vulnerabilities we face as an increasing number of our tasks take place on fewer massive platforms, at the same time hackers are gaining access to more powerful tools than ever. As Wired reports: “Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States.” Canvas is back online, at least for now, and class is back in session. For students, that means homework is due again. Platforms like Canvas have their own assignments to get done. And as we enter more dangerous online times, hackers ate my homework isn’t gonna cut it.