Teachers and students at Long Beach Unified, Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College were locked out of the computer system used for grades, assignments and messages on Thursday afternoon after an apparent cybersecurity breach targeting school districts and higher education across the country.
Long Beach Unified said it learned on Tuesday that Instructure, the third-party provider of the district’s grading platform, Canvas, had been hacked by an “unauthorized individual” who gained access to “certain identifying user information,” according to an email sent to families and staff, reviewed by the Long Beach Post.
The email said that Instructure confirmed the incident had been contained and that Canvas remained fully operational. But by Thursday after lunch, teachers told the Post they had lost access to the platform and that when they tried to log in, they were instead met with a pop-up allegedly from ShinyHunters, a cybercrime group linked to a series of high-profile data breaches this week from K-12 schools to major university systems nationwide…