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 and external affairs, said Canvas was down at Waubonsee for 16 hours. Luckily, most of the outage occurred overnight, so the college did not have to cancel 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 it paid a ransom to the hackers in exchange for deleting data they'd stolen.
The FBI has urged companies and government agencies not to pay ransom demands because there is no guarantee hackers will actually destroy the data.
Overall, Muhammad says Waubonsee was satisfied by Canvas' response and the quick turnaround in getting the platform back up and running before finals week.
Copy Edited by Eryn Lent
