Indian hackers conduct cyberattacks on Canadian gvmt' institutions

The Canadian government has been the target of cyberattacks, with a hacker group in India claiming responsibility for sowing chaos in Ottawa.

As reported by CTV News, these attacks have primarily targeted government institutions but have not compromised the core infrastructure that federal departments and agencies rely on.

The Canadian Armed Forces experienced website disruptions, specifically affecting mobile users, which were resolved within a few hours. It's important to note that the military's website is separate from government servers used by the Department of Defence and internal military networks.

Investigations into the incident are ongoing, and Canada's signals-intelligence agency believes that these attacks are more of a "nuisance" and haven't exposed private information to significant risk.

Defence Minister Bill Blair confirmed the incident was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which is when bots swarm a website with multiple visits and cause it to stop loading properly.

"That's a very common thing that happens, unfortunately, often. But our cyberofficials and security officials acted very, very quickly", he said on September 28.

"It was a minor inconvenience, and there is further work going on that we will eventually make a determination on".

The attacks occured against the backdrop of diplomatic tensions between the two countries as the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has accused the Indian government of carrying out the extrajudicial killing of a Canadian citizen inside the country of Sikh origin.