Canvas LMS, Harvard Westlake’s online learning platform known as the hub, temporarily shut down after a cybersecurity incident on May 6th. The incident affected both schools and colleges across the country, leaving students and teachers unable to access their homework, grades, or resources on the hub as they prepared for finals.
The incident came from a cyberattack targeting Instructure, the parent company of Canvas LMS. In response, Canvas was put into maintenance mode as Instructure tried to resolve the issue and restore security protections. The group that claimed responsibility for the incident is a hacker group known as ShinyHunters.
“Because the outage was on Instructure’s side, it wasn’t something HW could directly fix ourselves,” Chief Information Officer Dan Alig said. “We monitored the situation closely and shared updates internally as we had them.”
For Harvard Westlake students and teachers, the incident prevented them from accessing their work starting mid-day May 7th. Students were unable to view assignments or turn them in, causing some homework due dates to be postponed and teachers to find other ways for testing.
“I was in the middle of my history test when it happened,” Farrah Smith ‘29 said. “I couldn’t turn it in.”
Smith said she had to screenshot her answers to the test and email them to her teacher because she was unable to submit it on the hub.
According to reports, the incident may have exposed information such as names, emails, ID numbers, and other personal information stored on Canvas. Instructure stated there was no evidence that sensitive personal information was compromised.
“We also reviewed HW’s Hub data to make sure we were not storing sensitive student information that could be harmful if released,” Alig said. “Based on that review, we were able to verify that no sensitive student information was exposed.”
Shortly after during the evening of May 7th, the hub reopened for Harvard Westlake students and faculty and resumed normal operations.
