After those of the Quebec government on Wednesday, it was the turn of government sites in four other provinces and territories to be inaccessible on Thursday, due, in at least two of these cases, to cyberattacks.
Attempts to access several sites of the governments of Yukon, Manitoba, Nunavut and Prince Edward Island resulted in error pages early Thursday evening.
Prince Edward Island and Yukon have already confirmed that cyberattacks were the cause of the outages affecting their services.
According to these two provinces, “distributed denial of services” type attacks are used to target their pages. This technique consists of overloading a site by multiplying connection requests to prevent real users from accessing it.
Prince Edward Island and Yukon said in separate statements that the attacks did not compromise their data, but that delays could occur when making transactions at some of their locations Services.
For its part, Manitoba clarified that the interruptions affecting these services were caused by network and server problems, so that there was no indication that a cyberattack was involved.
Authorities in Prince Edward Island, Yukon and Manitoba have assured that teams are already working to resolve the problem. The Nunavut government was not immediately available for comment.
On Wednesday, Quebec government sites were also the target of “distributed denial of services” attacks. According to cybersecurity specialist Steve Waterhouse, these attacks, on around ten government sites, were the work of the Russian-speaking hacker group “NoName057”.
On Thursday morning, the Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital Affairs confirmed that the situation was back to normal.
“No data was compromised by this attack. Government infrastructure is still subject to increased surveillance by the Government Cyber Defense Center,” the ministry stressed on X (formerly Twitter).