Auckland students' details caught up in massive global university hack

An online learning system used by the University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Auckland (AUT), has been hit by a global data hacking incident.

Names, email addresses, student ID numbers and messages between users could all be affected by the breach.

Learning platform Canvas was offline, and the university said it was working urgently on workarounds to minimise the impact on teaching and learning on Friday.

The Canvas data was held by third party platform Instructure, which had its data hacked.

The University of Auckland said in a statement the university's own systems had not been breached and no other systems were at risk.

It said there was no suggestion that any student assessment data, passwords or sign-on credentials had been affected.

An email sent to staff at AUT, confirmed it had been impacted by the hack also.

It said the university's ICT team were working with Instructure and would advise when more was known.

It asked all staff to log out of Canvas.

Canvas was used in 9000 education systems around the world.

AFP was reporting, the hack had also hit US universities including Harvard, Stanford.

According to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper and posts on social media, students attempting to access the system on Thursday saw a message from the hacking group saying servers belonging to Canvas's parent company Instructure had "again" been breached.

"Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches,'" the hackers said.

"If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately...to negotiate a settlement."

The group warned it would release all stolen data if schools did not make contact by May 12.

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