Minister says 'no systems under attack' in Quebec following cybersecurity threat
CBC
Quebec's digital transformation minister said despite a widespread threat to government websites in the province and across the world, Quebec systems and user data do not appear to have been affected.
"From what we know now, no systems were under attack," Caire said in an interview with CBC Monday.
"Our teams were quick to react, very quick to solve the problem and put in place procedures to solve the problems."
The province did the right thing in taking nearly 4,000 government websites down temporarily in the face of a serious cybersecurity threat, according to one expert.
"I'm really happy to see that the Quebec cyber-defence centre was quick to alert authorities, as well as the private and public sectors, to block access to those sites," said Mourad Debbabi, the dean of Concordia University's Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science.
Some Quebec government websites taken down Sunday due to the massive software vulnerability are back online.
The websites of power utility Hydro-Québec and the Health Ministry were restored today, while the Education Ministry and some university services remain unavailable.
Quebec shut down close to 4,000 government websites following the threat of an international cyberattack on a widely used logging system.
Some 3,992 provincial government websites were deemed to be at risk, according to Éric Caire, Quebec's minister for government digital transformation.
Debabbi says the threat has affected millions of servers around the world, and that we can expect more like it in the future.
"Just like we are learning to live with COVID-19, we have to learn to live with the risk of these [cybersecurity] threats," Debabbi said.
The software flaw allows an unauthorized user to easily gain access to a vulnerable system over the internet.
Cybersecurity experts praised Quebec's decision to take the websites down, however, they warned that getting all government systems back online could take weeks or months.
Experts say Canadians should be careful online in light of a massive software flaw that has resulted in the precautionary shutdown of thousands of websites.
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