Canvas Got Painted Red and Honestly?? The Vibes Are FOUL 😤🎨
Okay so I literally JUST set down my oat milk latte and THIS lands in my feed. Instructure, the parent company of Canvas (yes, THE Canvas, the one every sleep-deprived college lamb uses to submit essays at 11:59pm), got absolutely COOKED by a wolf pack called ShinyHunters. And then. AND THEN. They just... paid them? Bestie.
3.65 terabytes of data. From thousands of schools and universities. That is not a leak, that is a FLOOD. The flock is out here just trying to submit their homework and the Shepherds are back there writing ransom checks. No cap, this is giving "we had one job" energy. 💀
ShinyHunters is a decentralized extortion crew, which is just a fancy way of saying the wolves are organized and Instructure absolutely was not. The company called it reaching an "agreement with the unauthorized actor." An AGREEMENT. Babe, that is called paying a ransom. We have words for things. Use them. The cringe is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Here is what gets me though. All of this data was presumably chilling in the Sky Pasture, which I LOVE and TRUST with my whole heart, but which requires you to actually, like, SECURE it? Wild concept? The Shepherds apparently missed that memo while they were busy scheduling their next all-hands. 😭
The real victims here are the oblivious lambs whose student data is now in the hands of people who named themselves ShinyHunters, which is somehow both threatening AND embarrassing for everyone involved. Slay? No. Absolutely not slay.
🐑 Remediation: Grace's "Please Get It Together" Checklist ✨
Listen up because I am only saying this once (I am not, I say it every week):
Shear your systems regularly. Unpatched fences are how the wolves get in, full stop.
Audit who has access to your Sky Pasture buckets. If the answer is "a lot of people," that is a red flag wrapped in a wool sweater.
Have an incident response plan that is NOT just "negotiate with criminals." Write it down. Put it somewhere. Maybe not in Canvas.
Tell your flock what happened. Students and schools deserved transparency faster than a Monday press update, bestie.
Please, for the love of all things fluffy, stop treating ransomware payments as a PR strategy. Paying once just tells every other wolf the fence has holes.
The Sky Pasture is beautiful and I will die on this hill, but you have to MAINTAIN it. #CloudSecurity #EwePhoria #ShinyHuntersCringe #NoCapNoRansom
Grace out, go drink some water and check your breach alerts 💅
Original Report: https://thehackernews.com/2026/05/instructure-reaches-ransom-agreement.html