(Montreal) Access to the Hydro-Quebec website and the Crown corporation’s application was restored early Friday after a paralysis of some 24 hours caused by a cyberattack.
The outage erupted around 3 a.m. Thursday, and for many hours, any attempt to access www.hydroquebec.com resulted in a page appearing indicating that the site was inaccessible.
The hackers’ modus operandi has been to launch what’s called a denial of service attack, flooding a website with requests to stop it from working.
A Hydro-Quebec representative, Francis Labbé, assured La Presse Canadienne on Thursday that the company’s critical systems had not been affected. Data and personal information could therefore be protected, he said.
Mr. Labbé reported that a team of about 300 people is at the service of the state-owned company to prevent cyberattacks as much as possible and to counter them when they occur.
The incident at Hydro-Quebec added to a series of computer attacks perpetrated by pro-Russian groups in recent days in Canada. In Quebec, the Port of Montreal, Port Quebec, the Laurentian Bank, the graphics card manufacturer Matrox in Dorval and the Prévost bus company were affected.
The attacks also affected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s website, the port authorities of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Port Alberni, British Columbia.
