Several government sites were out of service after being subject to a cyberattack claimed by a group of Russian hackers, confirms the Minister of Cybersecurity and Digital Affairs, Éric Caire.
“What we know is that they attacked the site of the Treasury Board, the Financial Markets Authority, the Ministry of Economy, the Securities Authority and Investissement Québec. “This is what we call denial of service attacks,” reported Minister Caire, on the sidelines of the Council of Ministers.
These are hackers operating under the name NoName057 (16), who since spring 2022 have cracked down on several Ukrainian, American, Canadian and European websites, including government agencies and media outlets.
In recent months, the same group has attacked, among others, the websites of the ports of Quebec and Montreal, as well as that of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
No data theft
Although hackers carry out these attacks “with the stated objective of stealing data,” upon verification, “this is not the case” for Quebec government websites, Caire said.
“We carried out checks, we looked at logs, we looked at all of our systems to make sure there hadn’t been an intrusion. (…) I still want to congratulate our teams, who reacted very, very quickly to shut down the systems. »
“No personal or sensitive information was compromised or replaced during this cyberattack,” Sylvain Théberge, director of media relations at the Financial Markets Authority, also indicated in an email.
There are no miracle solutions
The attacks began early Wednesday morning and, at the time of writing, several government sites were still inaccessible.
According to cybersecurity expert Steve Waterhouse, the sites of the Canadian Senate and the Federation Council were also attacked.
“There are no silver bullets to prevent this type of attack considering the size of modern botnets, other than applying better cyber hygiene at the foundation,” Waterhouse mentioned in Platform X.
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