Was Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach hit by ransomware?

Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach was listed by the shinyhunters ransomware operation (United States), and stolen data was published on the group's leak site. Darkfield tracks this disclosure with the original leak post, screenshot and group context.

Who is the shinyhunters ransomware group?

shinyhunters is a ransomware operator tracked by Darkfield. See the full operator dossier for its known victims, sectors targeted, IOCs and leak-site infrastructure.

What data was leaked in the Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach breach?

shinyhunters published data attributed to Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach. Darkfield captured the leak post and a screenshot of the listing.

Ransomware victim disclosure

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Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach

Claimed by Shinyhunters · listed 2 months ago

Age

since listed · data leaked

Status timeline

ListedMay 5, 2026
Data leakeddate unknown

At a glance

Group: Shinyhunters
Status: Data leaked
Country: United States
Sector: Education
Listed on leak site: May 5, 2026

About the victim

AI dossier — public-source company profile

Instructure is a US-based education technology company best known for Canvas, a widely-used Learning Management System (LMS) deployed by thousands of K-12 schools, colleges, and universities globally. The platform serves tens of millions of students and educators. The victim in this post is characterised not as Instructure itself but as the aggregate list of educational institutions whose data was allegedly obtained via a breach of Instructure's Canvas LMS platform.

Industry: Education Technology (LMS / Learning Management Systems)

Attack summary

Severity: critical — The breach involves a major LMS platform used by thousands of educational institutions, implying large-scale exfiltration of student PII (names, emails, academic records, potentially minors' data). Data has already been partially published (affected-schools list) with a credible threat of full release, affecting regulated data categories (FERPA-covered student records) at significant scale.

ShinyHunters claims to have exfiltrated data from Instructure's Canvas LMS affecting an undisclosed number of schools, and is threatening to publish all data unless affected institutions or Instructure negotiate a settlement by 6–7 May 2026; Instructure is stated to have not engaged with the group. A downloadable list of affected schools has already been published as proof of access.

critical

Data the group says was taken

AI dossier — extracted from the leak post

List of affected schools/institutions
Student data (implied, unspecified)
Institutional data from Canvas LMS (implied)

The group's post references roughly 1 proof file.

What the group claims

The download button below is a list of affected schools by the Instructure Canvas LMS data breach. If any of the schools in the file are interested in preventing the release of their data please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negociate a settlement. You have till the end of the day by 7 May 2026 before everything is leaked and there will be no chance at a negociation for anyone. Instructure has not even bothered speaking to us to understand the situation or to even negociate with us to prevent the release of this data. Our demand was not even as high as you might think it is. The Company seemingly does not care about all the students affected and the institutions impacted by this data breach. They still have by 6 May 2026 to come speak with us. There is no better option but to come to an agreement with us. Not paying will only worsen the situation rather than resolving it. | Updated: 5 May 2026 | Warning: FINAL WARNING PAY OR LEAK

Source

Indexed 2 months ago

This page surfaces a public ransomware disclosure indexed by Darkfield. Original posts come from the operator's own leak site; we cross-check against ransomware.live, RansomLook and RansomWatch where applicable. Share this URL freely.

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Disclosure context

About shinyhunters

Based on the limited publicly available information, shinyhunters appears to be a recently emerged ransomware group first observed in October 2025, primarily motivated by financial gain through extortion activities targeting organizations across multiple sectors. The group's origin and potential affiliations remain unclear due to their recent emergence, and there is insufficient public documentation to determine whether they operate as a Ransomware-as-a-Service model or as an independent entity. Their attack methodology and specific technical capabilities have not been extensively documented by major threat intelligence firms, though their targeting pattern suggests a broad opportunistic approach rather than sector-specific specialization. The group has reportedly victimized approximately 77 organizations, with primary targeting focused on the United States, France, Japan, Germany, and Australia, showing particular interest in consumer services, technology, financial services, transportation and logistics, and education sectors. Given the group's very recent emergence in late 2025, there are no widely reported major campaigns or high-profile incidents documented by established security research organizations, and no known law enforcement actions have been publicly reported against this group. The current operational status of shinyhunters remains active based on available reporting, though comprehensive threat intelligence profiles from major security firms like Mandiant, CrowdStrike, or government agencies have not yet been published due to the group's recent appearance in the threat landscape. The group has been linked to 139 public disclosures across our corpus. First observed on a leak site on October 3, 2025; most recent post July 15, 2026. The operation is currently active.

Timeline of this disclosure

May 5, 2026Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach listed by shinyhunterson the group's public leak site

Other recent disclosures by shinyhunters

shinyhunters has been linked to 139 public victims on Darkfield. A sample of the most recent:

See the full shinyhunters dossier →

Sector and geography

This disclosure adds to ransomware activity in the Education sector, which has 1,082 disclosures indexed across all operators we track. Geographically, Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach is reported in United States, a country with 11,033 ransomware disclosures in our corpus.

If your organisation is affected

A listing by shinyhunters means Entire list of affected schools by Instructure breach appeared on a ransomware extortion site and data attributed to it has been published. If this is your organisation, or a supplier you depend on, the priority is to confirm the intrusion and contain it before the window to act closes.

Engage your incident-response team and preserve forensic evidence before remediating — do not wipe affected systems first.
Force a password reset and revoke active sessions for exposed accounts; rotate any credentials, API keys or certificates that may have been in the stolen data.
Assess regulatory notification duties (GDPR, NIS2, sector regulators) — many carry a 72-hour reporting clock from awareness.
Report the incident to your national CERT, CISA (United States), as required for your jurisdiction.
Monitor for the data appearing on shinyhunters's leak site and across paste and breach channels, and brief downstream partners who may be exposed through you.

How we know this. Darkfield monitors public ransomware leak sites continuously, archiving every new disclosure and the data later released against the victim. Each entry on this page is sourced from the operator's own publication and cross-checked against complementary OSINT feeds (RansomLook, ransomware.live, RansomWatch). We do not collect or host stolen data — only the metadata, timestamps and screenshots needed to make the public disclosure searchable and accountable. Records here are corrected when the original post is edited, retracted, or merged with another disclosure.