Pro-Russian hackers claim attack on Prime Minister’s site, while Justin Trudeau receives his Ukrainian counterpart Denys Shmyhal in Toronto.
The Canadian Prime Minister’s website went offline for more than an hour. In addition, the Telegram account of the NoName group claims the attack, as does that of the bus manufacturer Nova Bus, whose site also seems to be down.
NoName is akin to what experts call “hacktivists”: politically motivated computer hackers.
“They mostly do denial of service attacks (DDOS-attacks),” says Brett Callow, cyberthreat expert at antivirus firm Emsisoft. This type of operation involves flooding a site with connection requests until it stops responding. “They are disturbing, but they are not very destructive. It’s an easy way for them to get their message across and keep the people opposite busy. »
Contacted by The Pressthe Prime Minister’s Office and the Communications Security Establishment, which monitors the integrity of the country’s information technology systems, had yet to call back at the time of this writing.
On its Telegram account, NoName denounces a cooperation mechanism that Canada has proposed with the United States, Japan and South Korea to deal with the alliance between Russia and China.
An alliance called to “strengthen” after “such Russophobic initiatives”, declares NoName on its English account, before boasting of having taken the official site of the Prime Minister offline.
According to Brett Callow, such groups are likely to be supported by the Russian state, if not directly exploited by Moscow.
“Their strategy is quite simple. Basically, they want people to think, “oh my god! If they can hack into the prime minister’s site, what else can they attack? Maybe they can cause explosions of oil pipelines?” »