After another orchestrated outage on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s site on Saturday, the pro-Russian group NoName claimed responsibility for two new cyberattacks on Sunday against Canadian organizations, including the Port of Montreal.
“We do not forget Canada,” the collective again indicated on the social network Telegram, announcing that the Port of Montreal website had again been targeted by a cyberattack. By late morning, however, access to the site appeared to have been restored, with the organization’s digital services mostly accessible.
Montreal Port Authority spokesperson Renée Larouche confirms that an “outage of services from our external site” was observed for approximately 60 minutes on Sunday morning.
“That said, like last time, our firewalls did the job very well. There has been no stoppage of our operations, nor any consequences. Everything is back to normal now,” said Ms. Larouche, whose group had already been targeted by NoName for the first time in recent weeks.
According to our information, the first attack had mainly targeted the IP address, while this time it was precisely the domain name of the Port of Montreal that was the target of the hackers.
The group also claimed Sunday an attack against the Canadian Transportation Agency, whose website was still paralyzed in the middle of the day. On Telegram, NoName had clearly indicated to blackout this website for an indefinite period.
For the rest, the other attacks by NoName seemed to be concentrated in Poland on Sunday, attacks having in particular been orchestrated against companies and banks in this central European country.
Earlier on Saturday, the collective had made it impossible to access the Prime Minister of Canada’s website intermittently. The Hamilton-Oshawa Port-Authority website was also affected by the attack, as was the Canadian Senate website, which was quickly restored.
Less than ten days ago, these same pro-Russian hackers had claimed other cyberattacks in Canada, including one against Hydro-Québec and against the Prime Minister’s site. In this second case, the attack occurred when Justin Trudeau was hosting his Ukrainian counterpart, Denys Chmyhal, in Toronto.
“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,’ then hammered Justin Trudeau.
Another hacker group, Black Basta, claimed responsibility for a cyber attack on the Yellow Pages. Copies of passports, RAMQ cards, account statements and driver’s licenses: La Presse found on the hidden web samples of confidential information stolen, in particular from Quebecers.
The NoName collective is what experts call “hacktivists”: politically motivated hackers. On its Telegram account, the collective has notably denounced in recent weeks a cooperation mechanism that Canada has proposed with the United States, Japan and South Korea to deal with the alliance between Russia and China. This alliance is called to “strengthen” after “such Russophobic initiatives”, the hackers had said.
