- Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Canadian officials said there was no major impact on their systems.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Canadian government is dealing with cyberattacks and a hacker group from India claimed it has caused a mess in Ottawa but the North American nation’s signals-intelligence agency said the “nuisance” attacks are unlikely to have exposed private information, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has reported.
The report said that while the attacks seem to have targeted government institutions in Canada, the “core infrastructure from which federal departments and agencies operate” remained unaffected.
It cited the Canadian Armed Forces as saying that while its website became unavailable to mobile users on Wednesday (27), the problem was fixed within a few hours.
The military said its site is distinct from other government sites, such as those of the defence department and internal military networks, the CBC report said, adding that an investigation was underway.
Military spokesperson Andree-Anne Poulin said they had no indication of broader impacts to their systems.
Canadian defence minister Bill Blair, who recently emphasised on the criminal investigation into the murder of Khalistan separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on the Canadian soil in June after prime minister Justin Trudeau’s allegations that New Delhi was involved in his killing caused a massive uproar in India, said the incident of cyberattack was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“That’s a very common thing that happens, unfortunately, often. But our cyberofficials and security officials acted very, very quickly,” he said Thursday (28), the CBC report added.
“It was a minor inconvenience and there is further work going on that we will eventually make a determination on.”
Various pages on the website of the Canadian parliament’s House of Commons were loading slowly or incompletely due to the alleged DDoS service that according to officials, began on Monday (25) morning.
The Elections Canada website also faced a DDoS attack that went for about an hour, the report added.
Ryan Foreman, spokesperson of Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s signals-intelligence agency, told the CBC that the DDoS is generally a nuisance event that hardly puts information at risk and has no permanent impact on systems.
A hacking group called Indian Cyber Force claimed responsibility for the incident involving the military and seemed to have infiltrated a few websites owned by small businesses in Canada, the Canadian news outlet further reported.
The group made reference to Trudeau telling the parliament on September 18 that there were “credible allegations” of Indian involvement in the killing of Singh Nijjar, who had been wanted by India for years and was shot outside a temple.
The hacking group also posted several versions of a message marked by spelling and grammatical errors onto websites of restaurants and medical clinics.
It also claimed to have taken down the Global Affairs Canada website for travel advisories, but the department insists this hasn’t happened. The group later deleted that claim from its account on Telegram, a social-media application.
