Millions of students' personal data stolen in major education cyberattack

Instructure confirmed a cyber incident and subsequent data breach affecting its cloud hosted environment. The breach involves the Canvas learning management system. The ShinyHunters ransomware group claims it is behind the attack. The group says it stole roughly 275 million records tied to students, teachers, and staff. The criminals shared a list of 8,809 school districts, universities, and online education platforms with BleepingComputer. They claim Canvas instances at those institutions were impacted. Record counts per institution range from tens of thousands to several million. Guidance for affected individuals starts with checking notifications from the school or Instructure. The notifications help determine what data was involved, such as name, email address, student ID, or course information. Recommended actions include changing passwords on Canvas accounts right away. Turning on multi factor authentication is advised where possible on parent or student accounts. Additional steps cover considering credit monitoring or identity restoration services for minors if sensitive identifiers were exposed. People should also watch for phishing and scam messages that reference real school details.