Minister Eric Kaer said a computer hacker may have accessed some government websites in Quebec that have been compromised by one of the most serious security breaches in recent years.
• Read also: The government is paralyzed: nearly 4,000 vulnerable websites have been disconnected
• Read also: Experts say safety is better than sorry
It is possible, we do not close the door to this hypothesis. But what I can say is that it leaves traces. The head of government digital transformation, in an interview Monday on QUB Radio, said that a person will break into the system, but there is still a trail that someone has fraudulently introduced themselves.
So far, the systems we’ve checked show none of these effects. We have no reason to believe as we speak that this is the case.”
On Sunday, Quebec ordered the emergency suspension of nearly 4,000 potentially vulnerable websites and government services after discovering a breach that allowed hackers to take over a server with a single line of malicious code.
The government guarantees that the closure of these sites was carried out in a preventive and non-reactive manner, because no trace of an attempt to enter them has been detected at the present time.
Among the offline sites on Sunday, “Le Journal” counted the Revenu Québec and Ministry of Education sites, certain services of the Ministry of Justice, the Retraite Québec portal, access to the Carnet santé Québec client and Espace Hydro-Québec.
On Monday, the Canadian Center for Cyber Security called on Canadian organizations of all kinds to pay attention to this dangerous vulnerability that affects organizations around the world.