{"id":190224,"date":"2018-11-18T21:46:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T02:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=190224"},"modified":"2018-11-18T21:46:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-19T02:46:50","slug":"quebec-is-an-embarrassment-province-urged-to-do-more-on-cybersecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/11\/18\/quebec-is-an-embarrassment-province-urged-to-do-more-on-cybersecurity\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Quebec is an embarrassment’: Province urged to do more on cybersecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Still, Quebec is not the only province experiencing attacks. Several municipal governments and businesses in Ontario were recently hit by ransomware attacks, prompting the Ontario Provincial Police to issue an advisory in September. (Pixabay Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MONTREAL \u2014 On Sept. 10, municipal employees in a region between Montreal and Quebec City arrived at work to discover a threatening message on their computers notifying them they were locked out of all their files.<\/p>\n

In order to regain access to its data, the regional municipality of Mekinac was told to deposit eight units of the digital currency Bitcoin into a bank account \u2014 roughly equivalent to $65,000.<\/p>\n

Mekinac’s IT department eventually negotiated the cyber extortionists down and paid $30,000 in Bitcoin, but not before the region’s servers were disabled for about two weeks.<\/p>\n

The attack highlights a glaring weakness in government servers in Quebec, according to Professor Jose Fernandez, a professor and malware expert at the Polytechnique Montreal engineering school.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuebec is an embarrassment,\u201d Fernandez said in an interview, adding that he has tried without success to contact government representatives to alert them to the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere hasn’t been any traction on this issue in the past 15 years,\u201d he said. \u201cI try to speak to (the government) but there is nobody. Who are you going to call? Nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bernard Thompson, reeve for the Mekinac regional municipality, said the ransom demand presented a real dilemma for his small organization. Mekinac groups together 10 municipalities with a population of roughly 13,000 people.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was hard, clearly, on the moral side of things that we had to pay a bunch of bandits,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p>\n

Mekinac’s attackers used malicious software \u2014 known as malware or ransomware \u2014 to demand money in return for keys to unlock the data.<\/p>\n

Fernandez said it is ironic that Quebec is home to a thriving cybersecurity industry and is an emerging hub for artificial-intelligence research, yet the provincial government is \u201cdecades\u201d behind other provinces in defending against cyberattacks.<\/p>\n

Still, Quebec is not the only province experiencing attacks. Several municipal governments and businesses in Ontario were recently hit by ransomware attacks, prompting the Ontario Provincial Police to issue an advisory in September.<\/p>\n

In response to the growing problem, Communications Security Establishment \u2014 the Defence Department’s electronic intelligence agency \u2014 launched the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security last month. It is responsible for monitoring \u201cnew forms of ransomware\u201d and advising the federal and provincial governments.<\/p>\n

Spokesman Evan Koronewski said the centre has no provincial or territorial equivalent.<\/p>\n

Fernandez, however, notes that some provinces are taking significant steps. British Columbia and New Brunswick have established offices dedicated to protecting government data. Meanwhile in Quebec, he said, small towns are left unprotected.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m hoping the new government does something about it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Patrick Harvey, spokesman for the Public Security Department, disputed the claim the provincial government is unprepared for cyberattacks.<\/p>\n

He said the Treasury Department has a director of information responsible for ensuring government data is protected. The Public Security Department has a unit dedicated to responding to cyberattacks within the administration and provincial police.<\/p>\n

But municipalities are not part of the unit’s mandate. \u201cMunicipalities are autonomous entities that are responsible for ensuring the security of their digital infrastructure,\u201d Harvey said.<\/p>\n

Mekinac’s servers were compromised after an employee opened and clicked on a link in a fraudulent email sent by the hackers.<\/p>\n

Once opened, the malware was downloaded onto the computer, giving the hackers access to the entire network. The hackers then encrypted all the data and held it hostage until they received their bitcoins.<\/p>\n

Once a system’s data is encrypted, it’s virtually impossible to crack the code without a key \u2014 and there is nothing police can do about it.<\/p>\n

Most professional criminals use commercial grade encryption and to locate a key to decrypt data would take \u201castronomical effort in terms of computing,\u201d Fernandez said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou either pay or you don’t get the data.\u201d<\/p>\n

The identity and location of Mekinac’s hackers were never discovered.<\/p>\n

Thompson said police seized some of his computers for analysis and told his office not to negotiate or pay the criminals.<\/p>\n

But Thompson said his region couldn’t heed that advice, because it would have meant months of data re-entry, costing significantly more than $30,000.<\/p>\n

So they paid, got their data back and learned a valuable lesson.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the end, in terms of the security of our system, (the attack) was actually positive,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p>\n

A local cybersecurity company \u2014 for $10,000 a year \u2014 helped the regional municipality build firewalls and encrypt its own data.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are practically no longer vulnerable,\u201d Thompson said. \u201cEverything is encrypted now. Every email is analyzed before we even receive it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He warns that small towns across the province are just as susceptible to attack as his region was.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day, our system catches malicious emails trying to penetrate \u2014 but they are stopped,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the attacks keep coming.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MONTREAL \u2014 On Sept. 10, municipal employees in a region between Montreal and Quebec City arrived at work to discover …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":190225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","category-news","mauthors-giuseppe-valiante","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}