It’s still unclear how many Iowa schools were impacted by last night’s cyber attack involving a learning software that’s used by thousands of school districts nationwide.
The hackers, who call themselves Shiny Hunters, threaten to leak personal data on students and teachers if ransom demands aren’t met by May 12th.
Leslie Heying, with the Sioux City Community School District, says the Canvas program was shut down when they learned of the attack.
“Canvas is the district’s learning management system, and we did become aware of a brief outage of Canvas last night, but by 11 p.m., it was back online,” Heying says. “At this time, our understanding is that no sensitive information was impacted by the incident.”
Reports say the exposed Canvas records include names, student ID numbers, email addresses, and billions of internal private messages. Heying says the district is monitoring the situation.
“Our technology and communication teams are working with our staff here to ensure that there are minimal disruptions to learning and our students can continue to access important class and test information,” she says, “especially as we approach the end of the school year.”
Reports say the University of Iowa and Iowa State University were also impacted, along with school districts including Des Moines, Iowa City and Marshalltown.
(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)