The Quebec government preventively closes almost all of its 3,992 websites, announced Sunday the Minister responsible for Access to Information and the Protection of personal information, Eric Caire.
This measure, which could last several days, affects government departments as well as the education and health networks.
“Friday the 10th, we received like everyone else on the planet the state of affairs” concerning a computer security breach which “concerns many systems”, he explained at a press conference.
The flaw “allows an attacker to break into a server” in order to then introduce malicious code and thus “take control of the server” and all the data it contains.
The offending item is part of a widely used open source Apache “library”. Fortunately there is a fix, a “patch”, to solve the security problem.
“We must scan all of our systems,” said Minister Cairo. We’re looking for a needle in a haystack. “
The websites will become available again as the correction is made, or as we have verified that they do not use the problematic element.
The quebec.ca site is already back online.
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