Météomédia’s parent company, Pelmorex Corp, announced Friday that it remained affected by a cyberattack that occurred last Monday. Some information is still inaccessible on its platforms, and the alerts in its mobile application do not work. However, the government system En Alerte, of which it is the technical supplier, was not affected.
“We encourage our users to visit our Weather in Action section if there are active weather conditions in their area,” Pelmorex said Friday in a press release. Weather alerts can be viewed there until notification functionality is restored again. »
Monday’s attack affected part of Météomedia’s website services and its English-speaking bias, The Weather Network. Both sites are still not providing complete data four days later. In fact, they have restored the current temperature and forecast data, but other information, such as current sunny, cloudy or rainy weather, is still not displayed.
The On Alert system is functional
On Alert is a weather alert system developed by Environment and Climate Change Canada and the provincial and territorial governments. It is associated with around twenty wireless plan providers in Canada to send emergency alerts to targeted customers. Pelmorex, which manages its IT infrastructure, ensures that it remains functional.
“It is important to note that our On Alert technical infrastructure operates independently and authorized government authorities can continue to issue alerts if necessary,” says the company based in Oakville, a suburb of Toronto.
Karen Kheder, director of communications for Pelmorex, said in a written statement sent to the media that “Pelmorex is working around the clock to restore our services to Canadians after suffering a recent malicious cyberattack.” The company also indicates that it has alerted the relevant authorities about the attack.
A statement released Thursday by the office of Federal Civil Protection Minister Harjit Sajjan said the government was aware of the cybersecurity attack and confirmed that On Alert was not affected.
Pelmorex, however, did not respond to the interview request from Duty and did not specify when all of its services would be restored.
Numerous incidents in the country
Many companies and government organizations here have been affected by cyberattacks in recent years.
On Thursday, the Russian-speaking hacker group “NoName057” claimed responsibility for several attacks, with screenshots supporting them, against government pages in Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Yukon and British Columbia. On Wednesday, he boasted of having paralyzed several Quebec government sites.
According to press releases from the governments of Yukon and Prince Edward Island, these attacks were of the “distributed denial of services” type, a technique which consists of overloading a site by multiplying the connection requests to prevent real users to access it.
What’s more, in February, book retailer Indigo was hit by an attack that cost it millions of dollars in lost sales because it was unable to process debit and credit card transactions for several days. . He couldn’t sell anything on his website for weeks.
In 2021, Rideau Hall was hit by a “sophisticated cyber incident” that allowed someone to gain unauthorized access to Rideau Hall’s internal computer systems.
Last month, a report released by the Canadian Center for Cyber Security warned that organized cybercrime, primarily from Russia and to a lesser extent from Iran, “would very likely pose a threat to the national security and economic prosperity of the Canada over the next two years.
With The Canadian Press