Recently, many colleges in California and throughout the country have been victims of a massive hack of the Canvas learning management system. It has affected thousands of college students. To make matters worse, the hack happened during finals week at some colleges, prolonging some classes or even ruining some individuals grades. 

The questions arise with secure browsers and student information leaked. How could this possibly happen? The most obvious answer is of course poor cyber protection against intruders. And it is true this is part of the reason but going deeper into the issue, a lack of money spent on security seems to be the bigger problem. 

Data leaks have been a prominent issue among colleges and only gets worse with a highly populated state like California. A unique aspect about the outage experienced is that not only were four-year colleges affected by it, but community colleges as well. For a breach this huge it would be expected that major research would go into it, but after everything has settled it seems as though no clarifying answer is yet to be given. 

What makes the issue so prominent is that, as students there really isn’t anything you’re able to do. As the institutes are in charge of your information and security over the browsers. When data is leaked how are we as individuals supposed to protect that? We can’t. Which is another reason why cyber-security is such a critical part of colleges.