An online learning management system is back online after a cyberattack created chaos for local school districts and colleges in Maryland.

Canvas, an online portal used by students and teachers, and parent company Infrastructure were attacked by hacking group ShinyHunters. The group is tied to several other notable attacks, including the Live Nation hack.

In a statement to CBS News on Friday, Instructure said the company took Canvas offline after learning that hackers had “made changes to the pages that appeared when some students and teachers were logged in.”

The hackers exploited an issue linked to its Free-For-Teacher accounts, the company said.

“As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down our Free-For-Teacher accounts,” the company said. “This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use. We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused.”

Canvas was also removed from a dark web leak site created by the ransomware group to publish stolen data.

Several school districts in Maryland avoided using Canvas altogether on Friday, including Anne Arundel County Public Schools, Harford County Public Schools, and Howard County Public School System. Baltimore City Public Schools uses the site, but said it had minimal impacts and does not believe the district’s data was stolen.

Baltimore County Public Schools does not use Canvas, and it was not impacted.

Local colleges and universities halted to a standstill in the middle of finals because of the breach. The University of Maryland urged faculty and students not to access the site on Friday morning. By midday, Canvas was fully restored.

Student reaction

Students at Johns Hopkins University say the website was down for about four hours Thursday night. This breach occurred during the middle of finals at the university, and students say that without the site, they didn’t have access to study materials.

“I don’t think I can manage without Canvas,” Aseel Adam, a first-year student at Hopkins, said. “I had a final today, so I was like, ‘Oh no’. I had to email my teacher about the slides final practice. It was bad.”

Students called it a major inconvenience and said they had a late-night studying after Canvas came back online.

“5 pm hits, Canvas is shut down,” Alveena Nasir, a first-year student at Hopkins, said.  “I am screwed. I have a final tomorrow. I have no access to any my files. I have no downloads…For that to shut down, I feel like the whole school shuts down.”

Canvas is used by students to review materials, submit assignments, and view their grades. Teachers are also able to communicate with students on the platform.

Students say they also don’t know what data may have been leaked and if it’s their personal information.

“They can get a lot of my information, fake it for someone else, or some bad, heinous crime. It did kind of worry me,” Adam explained.

Preventing future attacks

The Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute has been testing websites and platforms like Canvas, trying to find vulnerabilities to help prevent these types of attacks. Now, AI is making it easier than ever to take down this kind of system.

“In the old days, usually [it would] take an expert maybe a month to really come up with those complicated attacks. Recently, with the help of AI, [it takes] sometimes maybe one or two days, they can really come up with those complicated attacks,” Yinzhi Cao, technical director of the institute and associate professor of computer science, tells WJZ.

Cao says everyone needs to be more cyber-aware. To protect yourself, don’t give out deeply personal information to online platforms, use two-factor authentication, and even watch out for phishing emails.

Now, students are questioning the school’s reliance on Canvas and how they can be more prepared if there’s an attack in the future.

“The idea that we depend so much on Canvas for a lot of things is also an issue. I think there should be a balance,” Adam said.

“For having a website so fundamental to our education and not being able to protect it, I think there should be some considerations on improving it,” Nasir concluded.