ShinyHunters: Instructure breach affects 275 million teachers and students

The ShinyHunters strike again. This time, the hacker group claims to have hacked the systems belonging to one of the largest educational technology companies.

Edtech giant Instructure, the company behind the popular Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas, announcement that he suffered an interruption of service on April 30.

The next day, May 1, the company confirmed that it had been the victim of a “cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a malicious actor.”

Instructure largely resolved the issues on May 2 and said it would continue to monitor its platforms and investigate how the cyberattack occurred. The company said it patched its security system, revoked some credentials and access tokens, and rotated API keys “out of an abundance of caution.”

ShinyHunters, the now-infamous hacker collective known for social engineering and ransomware, claimed responsibility and uploaded 3.65 terabytes of stolen data to its website on May 3, as SecurityWeek reports.

What data was stolen?

Instructure claims that passwords and other private credentials were not stolen in the breach.

However, the data affected would include users’ names, email addresses, student IDs and private messages exchanged on the platform.

According to ShinyHunters, the stolen data is associated with 275 million users in nearly 9,000 schools around the world. These users include students, faculty and staff.

ShinyHunters also claimed that billions of private messages between users, including students and teachers, were also stolen, according to Bleeping Computer. The group claims that Instructure’s Salesforce instance was also hacked and associated data stolen.

ShinyHunters has recently been involved in several high-profile data breaches. Companies ranging from bakery chain Panera Bread to the security company ADT have all suffered data breaches linked to the group. Anime streaming service Crunchy roll and the dating app Bumblebee were also raped by ShinyHunters.

Last month, ShinyHunters was also behind the breach in Rockstar Gamesthe video game developer behind the GTA series, including the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI.

All of these ShinyHunters data breaches have occurred since the beginning of the year.

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