The federal government is concerned about cyberattacks perpetrated by state-sponsored agents targeting critical infrastructure, a senior intelligence official disclosed last week.
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Assistant deputy minister Scott Jones of the Communications Security Establishment intelligence agency has also confirmed that the government has been helping companies improve their defenses against such data breaches without revealing knowledge of the hacks to the public.
“Targeted attacks on Canadian infrastructure is something we are really worried about,” Jones told
Reuters.
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“Do we think something’s going to happen tomorrow? No,” he said. “Is it technically possible? Yes, and that’s what we’re worried about.”
According to Jones, Canada had seen a level of hacking activity that was “comparable” to what had been reported in the US.
He also noted that the Canadian government rarely goes public when it uncovers a data breach, to prevent attackers from finding out that they were caught. Instead, the government quietly gets in touch with the companies affected.
“We try to do it very quietly to help the company become more resilient,” Jones explained. “We’d like to try to give the defenders as much advantage as we can.”
Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service senior official Ray Boisvert said that infrastructure firms are not putting much effort into defending against cyberattacks, reasoning that it is probably because those firms have not yet felt the need for protection.
“We’ve yet to suffer a massive critical infrastructure attack and we’ve yet to suffer a massive loss of capability,” Boisvert said.
Boisvert warned that some 60 nations currently have the ability to conduct cyber warfare operations. It was only five years ago when only about five nations had that capability, he added.
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