Canvas has been in my life every school day of every year of school since the second half of my freshman year of high school. I could argue that I go on Canvas more than any other app on my phone.
This is the reason the hack of Canvas last week and the supposed leak of information is extremely unnerving. More information regarding the hack is available on the Clarion’s website.
Gianna Monroy, a Citrus student, first heard about the hack not from the school, but from a friend who goes to the University of California San Diego, a school that was more directly affected by the attack. After that, she then heard from her architecture professor, Tommy Reyes, “not to open Canvas,” and the college email followed shortly after.
She summed up the leak concerns in a way a lot of students probably felt: “Any sort of data breach is sorta scary.”
What is worth noting is that Ian Manuel-Quinonez, an architecture student at Citrus College, found out about the hack through TikTok and the New York Times before the school had even sent out a notification.
The fact that students were reading about it in the national news before receiving any word from their own institution is something that probably should not be overlooked.
Despite being ahead of the news on it, Manuel-Quinonez wasn’t overly worked up by it, saying, “If anything, this would make Canvas stronger.”
Whether or not students are losing sleep over it, the reality is that Canvas holds a serious amount of personal information, and the fact that it was compromised at all is worth paying attention to.
The amount of information it takes to verify identities on Canvas, as well as the introduction discussion posts from years and years of classes, has more information about me than my wallet.
Now, it is still inconclusive as to what information exactly has been leaked, or any at all, but the vulnerability of the website to be hacked so publicly in the first place is scary, especially when the hackers are making fun of the security by creating a pop-up shown to students trying to log in.
“Instead of contacting us to resolve it, they ignored us and did some ‘security patches,” the hackers said, in response to what numerous online threads on both X and Reddit believe to be Canvas’ failed attempts at keeping them out.
As schools push to become more environmentally conscious by using less paper and relying on Canvas more and more, I don’t think I’m alone in saying the security of Canvas should be held to the utmost degree.
This being said, Canvas was back up about seven hours after being shut down, which seems to me like a good sign. But if it was that easy for Canvas to kick the hackers out, why couldn’t Canvas couldn’t have kept them out in the first place?
