Socadis, one of the largest book distributors in Quebec, has been down since Sunday. His site has disappeared from the Web. His phone system is no longer responding. The company is reportedly the victim of a phishing campaign that could paralyze its service until after the lucrative holiday season.
“Our operations are still at a standstill and the business remains closed until further notice. We cannot take any orders. Email and telephone communication systems remain inaccessible,” Socadis shared Wednesday midday on its Facebook page. Company management did not respond to calls from Duty to give more details about his situation.
It is therefore difficult to know precisely what caused this total breakdown. Sources within the Quebec book industry speak of a phishing attempt that would affect its computer systems. This would be serious enough for the company to have cut the links that existed between its system and those of its partners, to prevent the computer threat from spreading. This would explain why its website and even its phone system are disconnected.
One thing is certain, all the publishers and all the booksellers in the province are on alert. In the Quebec book industry, Socadis is a heavyweight. It distributes more than a third of all the books sold in the province. Its clients include renowned publishers, mainly French and Quebecois, including the Flammarion group, Editis, Éditions de la Pastèque and Ulysse Travel Guides.
The vulnerable book industry
This computer outage also comes at a very bad time. The holiday season is extremely lucrative for booksellers and publishers. “It’s quite major,” confirms the president and founder of Ulysse Travel Guides, Daniel Desjardins. “I was told it could last at least another four weeks. »
Fortunately, most of the deliveries for the holidays have already been made, continues Daniel Desjardins, and January is not a big month for book sales, but “there could be stock shortages if Socadis doesn’t get through it not quickly enough.”
This is the second time this year that the book sector has been the victim of a cyberattack. Last March, the Canadian bookstore chain Indigo Books&Music was the victim of a ransomware attack. The cyberattackers subsequently got their hands on the personal information of the chain’s customers.
Indigo ultimately did not pay the ransom, but its financial results published during the summer showed that this cyberattack had cost it around 50 million.
“It is high time to start thinking about the security of our systems,” notes the general director of the National Association of Book Publishers, Karine Vachon. “It’s a shame that it takes crises like these to get people to react. We had already started discussing it with other organizations in the book sector, including booksellers and distributors, but the sector is shaken enough to accelerate this reflection. »