Major Hydro-Quebec customer services were completely disrupted yesterday due to what is believed to be an attack by Russian cyber hackers.
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Early Thursday morning, Hydro-Québec’s website, its Customer Space and Info-Outages pages, as well as its mobile applications were thrown into chaos, depriving the millions of customers of the Crown corporation of the digital services to which they are entitled. accustomed.
In the middle of the night
In an interview, spokesperson Maxence Hard-Lefebvre indicated that the teams responsible for Hydro-Québec’s computer security worked hard all day to restore their operation as quickly as possible.
“We are actively working on this, but have no clear indication of when services will be able to resume as normal,” he explained.
The state-owned company reportedly became aware of these outages around 3 a.m. Thursday morning. They would have been caused by a “denial of service” type attack. The latter consists of sending “massive amounts of network traffic in order to clog the targeted system and prevent legitimate users from accessing it”, summarizes Alexis Dorais-Joncas, cybersecurity expert at Proofpoint.
Secure private data
Hydro-Québec claims to be in control of the situation, to have taken the necessary measures to protect its sites and applications, and to see to their reinforcement with a view to their recovery. At the time of going to press, the timing of this recovery was not yet known.
Hydro-Quebec says it has no information suggesting an infiltration of hackers into its systems, nor a compromise of the personal data of its customers. “We rule out any risk of infiltration or exfiltration,” summarizes Mr. Huard-Lefebvre.
Screenshot: Hydro-Québec’s info-outages site
Hydro-Quebec’s Info-Outages site has been down since this morning.
Pending a possible restoration of its digital services, customers wishing to know the balance of their account to be paid are requested to contact by telephone the following number: 1-888-385-7252.
And customers who would like to inquire about the status of the restoration of electrical services in their area are invited to contact 1-800-790-2424.
Anticipating an increase in customer calls, the state-owned company yesterday increased the number of its telephone attendants by 33%. From 200 employees initially, their number had been increased to 300 in the middle of the day.