Last week, cybercriminals shut down the education technology platform Canvas, which is used at thousands of colleges and universities across the country, including Waubonsee Community College.
Clayton Muhammad, vice president for community engagement & external affairs, says Canvas was down at Waubonsee for 16 hours but, luckily, it was mainly at night, so they didn’t have to cancel any classes or exams.
“You have this continuity plan that we saw that we can put in place easily," he said, "that allows instructors to continue, if necessary, through email, through shared files, through virtual meetings, and through other platforms."
Muhammad says they were proud of how instructors and students communicated during the disruption. But the outage and data breach forced many schools to cancel classes and delay finals. Students couldn’t access assignments or grades.
The breached data included usernames, email addresses, and messages.
On Tuesday, Canvas’ parent-company Instructure announced they paid ransom to the hackers in exchange for deleting data they’d stolen.
The FBI has urged companies and government bodies not to pay ransom, because it’s hard to guarantee hackers will actually destroy the data.
Overall, Muhammad says Waubonsee was satisfied by Canvas’ response and the quick turnaround getting the platform back up in running before their finals this week.
