Colin Battersby featured in newscasts regarding Canvas cyberattack affecting thousands of schools

Colin Battersby, McDonald Hopkins' Data Privacy and Cybersecurity attorney, shared his insight and experience with media outlets in Detroit and Cleveland regarding the Canvas data breach, which impacted thousands of schools nationwide, including the Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.

Canvas, the platform schools use to manage coursework, grade assignments, and facilitate communication between professors and students, experienced a global outage around 4 p.m. Thursday.

Colin shared with both Fox2 Detroit and News 5 Cleveland what a data breach like this may mean for schools, what sensitive information attackers may be targeting in education-related cyberattacks, and why schools are prime targets.

An excerpt from Fox2 Detroit is below:

"Attackers like this like to have a two-pronged offensive," said expert Colin Battersby. "One is to steal data, which is more often than not really to be—not to be misused in the typical sense of trying to open up lines of credit—but to put pressure on the organization to pay them to delete it so that it doesn’t get released. We don’t actually see a lot of identity theft coming out of the theft of this type of data. The other point is encrypted data. These folks can cause them to have to pay to get a key to regain access to operations."

To watch the segment, click here.