As Ukraine’s Zelenskyy arrives, Canada’s CSE warns cyber ‘vigilance’ needed

Canada is subject to ongoing and persistent cyberthreats like every other government and private sector organization in the world, the CSE said in a release Friday.

Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is renewing its warning to be extra vigilant for cyber attacks amid the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy  and his speech to Parliament on Friday.

Zelenskyy arrived in Canada on Thursday — his first visit since 2019. He is set to address Parliament in person this time, the second since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“As previously noted, we have observed that it’s not uncommon to see increased distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaigns against NATO countries that support Ukraine, or host visits from Ukrainian government officials,” the CSE release states.

The CSE is urging website operators to adopt “a heightened state of vigilance, and to bolster their awareness of and protection against malicious cyber threats.”

The CSE is Canada’s signals intelligence agency, and responsible for protecting Canadian government networks. The agency and its Canadian Centre for Cyber Security also work closely with cyber-defence colleagues and critical infrastructure operators in the private sector to monitor and detect potential threats.

Multiple Canadian government websites were targets of cyberattacks this month.

Websites for Yukon, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Nunavut were all shut down Sept. 14. P.E.I. and Yukon said cyberattacks were behind their outages. The Quebec government also attributed a cyberattack this month to the pro-Russian hacker group NoName.

Officials in the three latter jurisdictions said cyberattackers used the denial-of-service tactic, in which the target website is flooded with too many requests and crashes.