Public Health Agency among most targeted for cyber threats: CSE

The Communications Security Establishment, which is billed as Canada’s foreign signals intelligence agency, says it responded to 2,206 cyber security incident cases affecting the Canadian government or critical infrastructure partners last year, as well as threats to the health sector during the pandemic. According to the CSE’s annual report for 2020-2021, those incidents related to the government were only some of the issues it responded to over the past year. The report, which includes data from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, says it also dealt with threats including espionage, terrorism, ideologically motivated violent extremism, hostile state activities, and foreign disinformation campaigns “seeking to undermine trust in Canadian public health guidance and the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.” “Online interference campaigns are no longer restricted to election periods,” the CSE said in the report, calling them the “new normal” as its so-called adversaries use social media to spread disinformation, polarize public opinion, discredit politicians, influence policy decisions, destabilize relations between countries, and delegitimize democracy. The CSE’s main responsibility is protecting the government of Canada’s networks, systems, and databases from cyber threats, routinely blocking between two and seven billion malicious actions every day according to the report, though that could be closer to 10 billion “on a particularly busy day.” As for disrupting foreign threats, the report said the CSE Act granted it new powers to conduct foreign cyber operations -- both active and defensive -- in 2019, “in other words, to take online action to disrupt foreign threats to Canada.” During its 2020-2021 year, the CSE said the most frequently impersonated government websites and email addresses were the Public Health Agency of Canada, Canada Border Services Agency, Canada Revenue Agency, and domains related to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, taking down over 7,000 such fake domains its “with trusted commercial and international partners.” As of May 2020, the Canadian Anti Fraud Centre had received almost 1000 complaints about fraud attempts related to COVID-19 since the beginning as COVID-19 got closer to home in March. Those fraud attempts included efforts to install malware and phishing attempts, where criminals use email or text messages, pretending to be linked to the Canadian Emergency Response Benefits process, to gain personal information that they could then use to impersonate them and gain access to banking accounts, though the biggest monetary losses stemmed from the fraudulent sale of goods related to COVID-19, such as masks, testing equipment or miracle cures, federal policing criminal operations Eric Slinn told the House of Commons industry committee last year. The Cyber Centre said in its latest report it partnered with over 100 health sector organizations such as health authorities, patient care facilities, and others involved in the development, manufacturing and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines as they “faced an elevated risk from cybercriminals seeking ransoms, and from state-sponsored groups looking to steal COVID-19 research and sensitive data.” In all, the centre issued over 20 cyber alerts to health sector partners in addition to incident response support in more than 85 cases. It said it also produced 2,528 foreign intelligence reports to alert officials across 28 government departments and agencies about threats to Canada. Throughout the pandemic, the government has been putting a renewed focus on cybersecurity as people were forced to work from home. The CSE said in its report it was forced to move up its own plans for switching its entire agency to a secure cloud environment, which the Cyber Centre was using, and it helped the House of Commons set up video-conferencing so parliamentary business could continue. It also said the Cyber Centre provided technical input on a secure virtual voting app used by MPs starting in March 2021. Since last spring, the government has officially launched its previously-announced Cyber Security Innovation Network program, the goal of which is to be a “pan-Canadian network” to support the growth of Canada’s cyber security ecosystem with public-private and industry-academia collaborations,” according to the program overview. — Reporting by Hannah Daley at hdaley@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Public Health Agency among most targeted for cyber threats: CSE

News | 06/28/2021 6:24 pm EDT

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