School-related nightmares are something of a universal experience across cultures and generations. Who among us hasn’t experienced a stressful dream where we’re suddenly thrust back into high school or college, about to take a major exam we’ve not prepared for, or staring down the barrel of some other scholastic catastrophe? Students at many American universities just went through a waking educational nightmare that will undoubtedly haunt their dreams long after graduation. This Thursday, May 7th, deep in the throes of finals week, students at The University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech, Duke, and elsewhere ran into trouble while attempting to use Canvas, the educational software employed by thousands of schools and universities around the world. In the place of the usual Canvas dashboard, students were instead greeted with a ransom message from the notorious black-hat hacker group ShinyHunters.…