by Chris ForbesIn January 2011 a cyberattack on the Canadian government was detected. Defence Research and Development Canada and the Finance and Treasury boards were targeted. The attacks were traced back to servers in China but it is still unclear if the attacks were directly from China or if they were being routed through China by someone else. The government has been quiet about the incident only saying that there was an "attempt to access" fedral networks.
The attack gained control of senior government official's computers and is believed to be part of a plan to steal passwords to unlock data systems. A security analyst and former CSIS officer believed that China was where the attacks started from. When the attack was first detected internet service was stopped at the Finance Department and also at the Treasury Board. The security analyst believes that the hackers have a connection to the Chinese government, that is known to promote 'patriotic hackers', people who attack based on percieved threats to their own government. The Chinese government has denied that the attacks were their responsibility.
Many government employees, some say into the thousands, have been without internet access. In some cases, such as Defence research and Development, internet access was down for two months. As of now service has slowly started to return to the affected departments.
A group calling themselves the Information Warfare Monitor says that a spy network based in China has hacked into 1300 government computers throughout 103 countries. They believe that the attacks started in 2009 but it wasn't until late 2011 that Canada started to improve it's security and then in early 2011 found the security breach. The group responsible for the original 2009 attacks was labeled 'Ghostnet' by the Information Warfare Monitor and the Ghostnet methods of comprimising other computers was the same as the methods used on the Finance and Treasury Board of Canada.
The attack itself was very simple. Hackers using servers in China took over government computers that belonged to high ranking government officials. Then posing as these officials sent emails to technical staffers that asked for passwords and information that would unlock government networks. Emails included seemingly innocent attachments that when opened released a virus that would search for sensitive information and then send that information back to the hackers using the internet.
According to Shelia Fraser, the Governor General in 2002, she warned that Canada's government had weaknesses in it's system. In 2005 not much had changed and in 2011 these attacks were noticed. Only then has something been done to increase the security of the system.
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