After the website of the Prime Minister of Canada, self-proclaimed pro-Russian hackers claim on Wednesday the decommissioning of the Internet pages of the Port of Quebec and the Laurentian Bank, among others.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s site was also inaccessible to the public again on Wednesday morning, after being the victim of a first denial of service attack the day before. Internet users could not consult either the page of the Quebec Port Authority or that of the Port of Halifax, in Nova Scotia and Port Alberni, in British Columbia.
“We have a problem with the server which is hosted externally,” confirms the director of communications for the Quebec Port Authority, Frédéric Lagacé. He specifies that there is no impact on the current activities of the port. “The ships continue to moor. »
The Laurentian Bank page was experiencing service interruptions at times on Wednesday, found The duty. The bank confirms having noted the failure. “We are working to make it 100% operational. We are investigating the exact causes, ”said his spokesperson, Merick Séguin, in the morning.
In a message claiming responsibility for the attack, a group of pro-Russian hackers justified having targeted this banking institution by Canada’s new sanctions against 14 people and 34 Russian entities.
“Once again, we have shut down the official website of the Canadian Prime Minister, who recently sang that he ‘isn’t afraid of Russian hackers,'” reads a series of posts punctuated with emoticons that display its support for the Russian army in Ukraine.
The missives were posted early Wednesday on a forum in the Telegram messaging app, used by the group named NoName057. Their authors claim several other attacks against Canadian companies or institutions in recent days, such as bus manufacturers Prevost Car and Nova Bus on Tuesday. Federal departments were also targeted over the past weekend.
Not worrying
“The goal is to cripple a site, and the way to do that is to cause an overload of demand. We are going to send requests to that site in a very large volume, and that has the effect of overloading the servers,” explains Guy Bégin, professor in the computer science department at UQAM.
According to him, Internet users and clients of the targeted institutions have nothing to fear, since this “unsophisticated” attack is mainly intended to disturb, and not to extract personal information, for example.
“It’s like a short storm that you have to master. As soon as the resources of the attack are going to be deployed elsewhere, they will turn away from a first victim,” he said.
The experts consulted compare such a computer attack to the effect on the water system of a coordinated effort to flush the toilet at the same time, or even the impossibility of phoning a number that receives hundreds of calls. This phenomenon is well known and frequent, but difficult to protect against.
Some services are however capable of mitigating the risk of an attack, according to Jacques Sauvé, cybersecurity consultant and owner of the firm Trilogiam.
“It’s boring for bank customers trying to log in, but they can try again later. For websites [comme] the Port of Quebec, people don’t go there every day,” he comments. He adds that government sites seem relatively well protected since they come back online quickly after being targeted.
Although this group of pro-Russian hackers has been targeting Canada for the past few days, it has recently claimed similar actions for months in other countries around the world, such as Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy.