UBC has issued a warning to its students after what appears to be a cyberattack.
Canvas, UBC’s primary learning platform for delivering course content, appears to be the target of the attack.
In an Instagram story post, UBC said that Canvas is “unavailable due to a cyber breach involving Instructure, the provider of Canvas.”
“UBC community members should not log into Canvas until further notice,” UBC said.
It also told students who were still logged in to log out and change their CWL passwords “immediately.”
The warning was initially issued on UBC’s IT page at around 1:30 p.m. The IT team is asking students who may have logged in after 12 p.m. to reach out to security@ubc.ca, and that it would provide more updates “as soon as we have them.”
Students are also discussing the cyber breach on the UBC subreddit.
“This is a huge story,” one person in the comments said.
Other comments suggest this breach is impacting other universities, too.
There’s also a megathread about the incident on the UBC subreddit.
We have contacted UBC for more information on the apparent cyberattack and will update this story when we hear more.
The website Hackread actually posted about the Instructure breach yesterday. TechCrunch reported it two days ago.
“Hackread.com has obtained the full list of affected institutions impacted by the Instructure data breach, and it is massive, indicating the vast scale of the theft and impacting around 15,000 institutions across the UK, Europe, and the US,” the publication stated.
“ShinyHunters claim that they have stolen 3.65 terabytes of data. This includes a whopping 275 million records, and it isn’t just basic info, as it contains billions of private messages between students and teachers.”
Some of the universities Hackread mentioned that were on the list included:
- University of Oxford
- University of Melbourne
- University of Cambridge
- University of Hertfordshire
- University of British Columbia
- Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University