Indian hackers take claim for cyberattacks on government, military websites

The federal government is coping with cyberattacks this week, as a hacker group in India claims it has sowed chaos in Ottawa -- but private information likely isn't at risk.

The federal government is coping with cyberattacks this week, as a hacker group in India claims it has sowed chaos in Ottawa — but Canada’s signals-intelligence agency says the “nuisance” attacks likely haven’t put private information at risk.

The attacks seem to have hit institutions controlled by the government, but not the core infrastructure from which federal departments and agencies operate.

The Canadian Armed Forces says its website became unavailable to mobile users midday Wednesday, but was fixed within a few hours.

The military said the site is separate from government servers used by the Department of Defence and internal military networks. The incident remains under investigation.

“We have no indication of broader impacts to our systems,” said a statement from spokeswoman Andree-Anne Poulin.

Defence Minister Bill Blair confirmed the incident was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which is when bots swarm a website with multiple visits and cause it to stop loading properly.

“That’s a very common thing that happens, unfortunately, often. But our cyberofficials and security officials acted very, very quickly,” he said Thursday.

“It was a minor inconvenience, and there is further work going on that we will eventually make a determination on.”