Access to the Hydro-Québec website and the Crown corporation’s application was restored early Friday after a paralysis of some 24 hours caused by a cyberattack.
The outage occurred around 3 a.m. Thursday, and for many hours, any attempt to access www.hydroquebec.com resulted in a page appearing indicating that the site was inaccessible.
THE modus operandi hackers was to launch what is called a denial of service attack, flooding a website with requests to prevent it from working.
A representative of Hydro-Québec, Francis Labbé, assured Thursday The Canadian Press that the company’s critical systems had not been affected. Data and personal information could therefore be protected, he said.
Mr. Labbé noted that a team of about 300 people was at the service of the state corporation to prevent cyberattacks as much as possible and to counter them when they occur.
The incident at Hydro-Quebec added to a series of computer attacks perpetrated by pro-Russian groups in recent days in Canada. In Quebec, the Port of Montreal, Port Quebec, the Laurentian Bank, the graphics card manufacturer Matrox in Dorval and the Prévost bus company were affected.
The attacks also affected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s website, the port authorities of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Port Alberni, British Columbia.
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