“Saskatchewan, similar to what is being reported in other jurisdictions, is currently experiencing an online-based denial of service.”
Published Sep 14, 2023 • Last updated 16 hours ago • 2 minute read
The Government of Saskatchewan says there is no indication that personal information was compromised or shared after being targeted in a cyberattack, mirroring similar reports from other provinces.
A government spokesperson confirmed Thursday that Saskatchewan web servers, services or networks experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) through a barrage of internet traffic aimed at crashing the system.
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The main landing page for the government website, www.saskatchewan.ca, remained functional but certain affiliated pages, like Saskatchewan Account and the Publication Centre, went dark around 5 a.m. Thursday.
By noon Friday, all targeted Saskatchewan services were restored, but the province was “still experiencing a high volume of malicious traffic directed at our public facing sites; however, the sites are protected via our web application firewall,” a spokesperson said in an update.
Government websites in four more provinces and territories were shut down Thursday, with at least two other jurisdictions blaming cyberattacks for their outages.
Websites for Yukon, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Nunavut were all inaccessible. P.E.I. and Yukon said cyberattacks were behind their shutdowns.
A news release from P.E.I. said an attack had not compromised data but warned it might hinder transactions at government service centres.
Manitoba said its interruption was due to network and server infrastructure and there was no indication it was related to a cyberattack.
Officials in Yukon and P.E.I. said cyberattackers used the denial-of-service tactic, in which the target website is flooded with too many requests.
“A denial-of-service attack usually involves a specific threat actor targeting a specific domain and using a botnet — a bunch of computers that have been compromised on the internet and forcing those computers to attack a specific website,” Daniel Mitchell, CEO of Alt-Tech, an Edmonton cybersecurity company, told The Canadian Press.
“They flood that website with a bunch of requests all at the same time.”
Mitchell said such attacks don’t normally steal data. But he said they can be used to hide such hacks.
“The hack will usually take place first, then a denial-of-service attack will go in and force these servers to lock up and cause a reboot, which may wipe out proof of existence of the hack.”
— with Canadian Press files
alsalloum@postmedia.com
