Canadian Government Suffers Denial Of Service Attack By Anonymous

The Canadian government has yet again been the victim of a cyberattack. Here’s the details from The Globe And Mail:

A cyberattack crashed federal government websites and e-mail on Wednesday afternoon, Treasury Board President Tony Clement said.

He said it was a denial-of-service attack on the gc.ca domain server, which rendered many federal government websites inaccessible and left many government e-mail accounts unusable.

“There’s been a cyberattack on the gc servers of the government of Canada,” the minister told The Globe and Mail.

Industry, Employment, Natural Resources, Fisheries and Oceans, Justice, Labour, Foreign Affairs, Environment Canada and Transport Canada were inaccessible. “There’s only sporadic e-mails that are making their way through,” Mr. Clement said.

However, within several hours, the attacks had subsided and government website and e-mails were functioning normally once again.

A denial of service attack basically floods a website with so much bogus traffic that it impairs or crashes the web site or server. Typically, no info is stolen as the attackers never actually never get into the system or systems that they are attacking.

Who’s responsible for this? Apparently it’s the hacker group Anonymous who posted a YouTube video to claim responsibility and to say that it was in retaliation to the passing of Bill C-51 which is the Canadian government’s anti-terrorisim bill:

Now, the reason why I said that the Canadian government has again been a victim of a cyberattack is because they were a victim of a heartbleed related attack as well as an attack by Chinese based hackers on the National Research Council. It’s pretty clear that Canada is unprepared for cyberattacks and you’d think after repeated attacks they’d get their act together. Clearly that’s not the case and that’s pretty sad on the part of the Canadian government. Clearly they need to step up their game.

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