Instructure data breach: ShinyHunters says it stole data and private messages from 275 million teachers and students

ShinyHunters have struck once again. This time, the hacker group says it has breached systems belonging to one of the biggest educational tech companies.

Edtech giant Instructure, the company behind the popular Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas, announced that it was experiencing a service disruption on April 30. 

The next day, on May 1, the company confirmed that it experienced a "cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." 

Instructure largely addressed the issues by May 2 and shared that it would continue to monitor its platforms and investigate how the cyberattack occurred. The company said it patched its security system, revoked certain credentials and access tokens, and rotated API keys "out of an abundance of caution."

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

What data was stolen?

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

However, the affected data reportedly includes 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 at nearly 9,000 schools around the world. These users include students, teachers, and staff.

ShinyHunters also claimed that billions of private messages between users, including students and teachers, were stolen as well, according to Bleeping Computer. The group says Instructure's Salesforce instance was also breached, and related data was stolen.

ShinyHunters have been involved with several high-profile data breaches recently. Companies ranging from the bakery chain Panera Bread to the security firm ADT have all experienced data breaches tied to the group. Anime streaming service Crunchyroll and the dating app Bumble have been breached by ShinyHunters as well.

Last month, ShinyHunters were also behind the breach into Rockstar Games, the video game developer behind the GTA series, including the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI.

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

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