Canvas, the online learning management system used by the University of Missouri, is back up and running after it was breached during the last week of the semester by hacker group ShinyHunters. But MU officials are still encouraging students and faculty to utilize caution while navigating the system — should another outage occur.
In an email sent at 10:26 a.m. Friday morning, Matthew Martens, the provost and executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs, said MU instructors should download current gradebooks in the event final grades need to be calculated during another outage.
Martens also said instructors should have contingency plans for delivering final exams and submitting final assignments. He also said some functions of Canvas may still be affected, such as online proctoring service Honorlock, which is currently disabled. In the campus-wide email, Martens encouraged instructors to test whether the Zoom and Panopto functions in Canvas are working.
The email also acknowledged the timing of the breach, as MU students and professors are preparing for finals week and the end of the semester.
"With the end of the semester approaching, we know this incident has created uncertainty for both instructors and students. Thank you for your patience, flexibility and commitment to supporting one another during this unexpected disruption," Martens said in the email.
According to previous KBIA reporting, the University of Missouri was one of thousands of schools affected by the breach of Instructure, the parent company of Canvas. ShinyHunters, which had requested an unspecified amount of money in return for not releasing the personal information of students and faculty members, had encouraged universities to negotiate in the event Instructure failed to come to terms with the hacker group by May 12.
According to a previous MU update email, the university wrote that there had been "recovery efforts by the vendor." It did not address what those efforts entailed.
Mizzou spokesperson Christopher Ave declined a taped interview. Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, did not respond to a request to comment before publication.
