The note read: “Shiny Hunters has breached Instructure (again).” <\/p>\n
It threatened to release stolen data unless a ransom was paid in bitcoin by Canvas or affected universities.<\/p>\n
“My knee\u2011jerk reaction was that I’d been hacked myself, because that’s what it looked like,” Palmer said. “But then I actually read the ransom note and saw it was Canvas that had been hacked.”<\/p>\n
Aubrey said their professor and dozens of students received the same message, and there was confusion in the exam room about whether their work had been saved.<\/p>\n
Mississippi State University later announced some exams would be postponed to allow students to recover any lost work.<\/p>\n
Shiny Hunters is known for hacking organisations, stealing data and then publicly pressuring victims to pay ransoms in bitcoin.<\/p>\n
The group has been linked to other breaches, including attacks on Jaguar Land Rover and Gucci. The criminals are English\u2011speaking and believed to be young.<\/p>\n
In Telegram messages exchanged with the BBC, Shiny Hunters said it had hacked Canvas twice before last Thursday’s attack.<\/p>\n
Instructure disclosed a breach in September 2025 in a post on its blog.<\/p>\n
Shiny Hunters has also claimed it breached the company again in April 2026, ahead of the 29 April attack.<\/p>\n
When asked how it felt about the stress and disruption caused to students like Aubrey Palmer, the group said: “We have no comment on that.”<\/p>\n
It would not say how much it had been paid by Instructure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The note read: “Shiny Hunters has breached Instructure (again).” It threatened to release stolen data unless a ransom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-579709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}