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Saskatchewan Government Victimized with ‘Malicious’ Cyber Assault

 

A cyber assault is tentatively the reason behind the internal e-mail and website of the government of Saskatchewan being shut down; however, according to officials, work is going on while some minor anomalies exist. On May 14, Saskatchewan.ca was offline at night for some 2-hrs after which the next morning Internet access and e-mail of the government was disrupted.

 

Richard Murray, deputy minister Central Services explains the problem seems to be from one DOS (denial of service) assault wherein multiple sources' traffic inundates external firewalls, making systems run slow.

 

Saskatchewan province indicated on May 15 that traffic had inundated its network over the weekend due to which there was a 2-hr disruption of Saskatchewan's website as well as other problems related to the system. According to Murray, 11,000 PCs that different ministries of the government used were impacted.

 

Telling Regina, Richard Murray said that the government's security team was continuing to analyze the situation for determining what the source of the assault was as also what was its nature. According to him, it hadn't gotten figured out if it was associated with the WannaCry ransomware attacks spreading worldwide. Thestar.com posted this, May 15, 2017.

 

It's reported that the impacted systems have association with the province's agricultural sector, courthouses, as well as the Ministries of 'Justice' and 'Central Services.'

 

Saskatchewan government hasn't still substantiated if the assault is another WannaCry assault that of late impacted 150 countries. Being a ransomware, the WannaCry malware blocks users' access to their PCs till the time they pay a ransom fee.

 

Murray notes that the provincial government encounters large numbers of attempted cyber-assaults daily while the assaults' sophistication has grown and continuing. To tackle that it continually upgrades its security systems with technology evolving.

 

Murray says if the incident was due to a ransomware attack then the Saskatchewan government will do as experts advise such as wholly erasing the system's data followed with reloading the same from back-up databases. Most importantly, it won't pay up to the criminals. According to Murray, teams of security experts are continually striving towards analyzing the situation as well as patching up vulnerabilities in the system.

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