Numerous Provincial and Territorial governments were hit with a Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) thought to be linked to nation-state perpetrators. The services and infrastructure in Yukon Territories, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, Nunavut, and Quebec were impacted.

Quebec, PEI, and Yukon confirmed their outages were caused by cyberattacks. Manitoba is believed to have had a non-cyberattack related outage and Nunavut had not commented on the nature of their outage.

This is shortly after the Canadian cyber center issued guidance on the likelihood of increased malicious activity by nation-state sponsored groups or those sympathetic to Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

As public institutions and part of our nation’s critical infrastructure healthcare facilities can expect to be targets for future malicious activity. The intent being to reduce the ability to serve the public and not necessarily for monetary gain – just as we saw in the New Brunswick cyberattacks of 2021.

It is incumbent on Biomedical Engineering departments to ensure they are doing all they can to reduce medical device cybersecurity risk and keep our systems operational for use in the clinical setting.

More information can be found here:

Multiple government websites down across Canada, cyberattacks blamed for 2

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-government-says-data-not-compromised-after-websites-hit-by-cyberattack-1.6560005

https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/alerts-advisories/distributed-denial-service-campaign-targeting-multiple-canadian-sectors