The pro-Russian group NoName claimed Saturday on its Telegram account to be responsible for an outage affecting the website of the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, and the port of Hamilton-Oshawa, located on the edge of Lake Ontario.

It was impossible to access the website of the Prime Minister of Canada for a while. Access was restored mid-afternoon. At press time, the Hamilton-Oshawa Port-Authority website was still down.

On its Telegram feed, the pro-Russian group NoName announced on Saturday that it had decided to “take a trip to Canada”.

They say they were able to bypass the Canadian Senate website. The latter was however functional on Saturday afternoon. They then attacked the Prime Minister’s website and that of the Ontario port.

Then, the pro-Russian group brought its actions back to Europe and attacked various Polish authorities, including the metro in the capital Warsaw, they said on Telegram.

Less than ten days ago, these same pro-Russian hackers had claimed other cyberattacks in Canada, one against the Prime Minister’s site. The attack occurred when Justin Trudeau received his Ukrainian counterpart, Denys Chmyhal, in Toronto.

“It’s not unusual for Russian hackers to target countries when they demonstrate their unwavering support for Ukraine by receiving a visit from a large Ukrainian political delegation, so the timing is not surprising,” said so said Justin Trudeau at a press conference with his Kyiv counterpart.

“Let me be extremely clear: the fact that for a few hours there was a government page that was difficult to access is not going to deter us from being present and always there to do more to support the ‘Ukraine,’ he added.

“Is there an upsurge in these types of attacks? Yes. And with impunity, because Russian hackers can do these crimes and no one is going to get them in Russia,” says cybersecurity expert Steve Waterhouse.

“[These criminals] have fun like that,” adds Mr. Waterhouse. It is really to disturb our society, to make us have a bad time and to antagonize the population against the government. To change opinions. It is a war of attrition. »

In his view, if hackers manage to affect certain infrastructures and destabilize the economy, they will have gained points.