Hey, welcome to the first post. I’m Alex, or the OvernightHacker — I work overnight shifts monitoring cameras and I’ve been teaching myself cybersecurity on the side and pursuing it as my major, I’m a senior finishing some classes up this summer. This blog is just me breaking down what happened this week in a way that actually makes sense. Let’s get into it.
The biggest story: someone hacked every school’s homework website
You know Canvas? It’s the website basically every college uses to submit assignments, check grades, message professors. Millions of students depend on it.
Well, a hacker group called ShinyHunters broke in right in the middle of finals week — not an accident, they timed it — and replaced the login page with a ransom note. Like, you go to log in to submit your final paper and instead you get a message saying “pay us or we release everyone’s data.”
They claimed to have stolen data on 275 million users. Private messages between students and teachers. 8,000+ schools worldwide. It’s being called the largest educational data breach ever.
The company eventually paid them — rumored to be around $10 million — and said the data was deleted. Whether you believe that is up to you.
The embarrassing part? A big reason this got so bad was that a ton of accounts didn’t have two-factor authentication turned on. That’s the thing where your phone gets a code when you log in. Simple stuff that could’ve made this much harder.
Two big companies got hit too
A medical device company called Medtronic and an energy tech company called Itron both reported breaches this week. Medtronic’s was also linked to ShinyHunters. Not a great week for that group’s victims.
Linux got attacked by politically motivated hackers
Canonical — the company that makes Ubuntu, which is a popular free operating system — got hit with what’s called a DDoS attack. Basically that means thousands of fake requests flooded their servers at once until the site crashed. The group behind it had ties to the Iranian government and also demanded money. Ubuntu’s services went down temporarily.
A popular coding tool got secretly turned into malware
This one’s sneaky. A tool called node-ipc — something developers use when building apps — had three versions quietly updated to include hidden malicious code. Developers who updated without checking could’ve installed a backdoor into their own projects without knowing. This is called a supply chain attack and it’s one of the scariest types because you think you’re doing the right thing by keeping software updated.
Microsoft’s SharePoint has a hole in it — and people are already using it
SharePoint is software a lot of companies use to share files internally. A critical vulnerability was found that lets attackers run their own code on your system remotely — meaning they don’t even need to be in the building. It’s already being exploited, so if your company uses SharePoint, someone needs to patch it ASAP.
And finally: someone built a business stealing Roblox accounts
Ukrainian police busted a group that hacked and resold over 600,000 Roblox accounts, making about $225,000 doing it. I know it sounds silly but this is real organized crime. Gaming accounts have real money tied to them and people pay for them.
That’s the week. Nothing too technical, just what happened and why it matters. If you want me to go deeper on any of these, drop a comment. Anyway, time for me to get to work, the city streets don’t watch themselves…
— OvernightHacker
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