India, May 8 -- On Thursday, thousands of colleges in the United States dependent on Instructure's Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas face an outage starting Thursday afternoon.

The Black Hat hacker group named ShinyNet put up a message on the platform, taking responsibility for the cyberattack. Millions of students and staff who logged into the platform on Thursday afternoon were greeted with a message from ShinyNet.

The message, notably, said that they have data of over 250 million students and staff and they plan on leaking it if a ransom demand they made to Instructure. The exact amount demanded in ransom was not revealed, but a deadline of May 12 was provided.

The message instructed the colleges affected by the cyberattack to...