A computer attack was claimed against the Canada Border Services Agency website on Sunday. On the same day, an outage disabled check-in kiosks at border checkpoints at Canadian airports.
Posted at 6:24 p.m.
The DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was claimed by user NoName057 on his Telegram account. He has already claimed responsibility for several other attacks on Canadian websites, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s website last April.
Just last week, he claimed responsibility for new attacks on the Quebec government and then on those of eight other Canadian provincial and territorial governments.
Late Sunday afternoon, a “national computer outage” at check-in kiosks reportedly caused a slowdown at border checkpoints across the country, including at Montreal-Trudeau International Airport. “said its operator Aéroports de Montréal (ADM).
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) subsequently confirmed that there had been “intermittent connectivity issues with kiosks and electronic gates” at airports across the country.
However, the organization declined to comment on Monday, saying it had “no new information to share regarding this outage at this time.”
In fact, “Distributed Denial of Services” attacks do little damage to the attacked systems. They simply consist of overloading a site by multiplying connection requests.
Overloaded website
According to several cybersecurity experts interviewed, the computer system of airport check-in terminals should normally be closed-loop, meaning it would not be connected to the Internet and therefore could not be the target of such attacks.
“Denial of service depends on how the network is connected,” emphasizes Karim Ganame, cyber threat detection expert at Streamscan.
His colleague Alexis Dorais-Joncas, a cyber threat specialist at Proofpoint, also points to the possibility that the check-in kiosks and the CBSA website share a common database, which could become bogged down if the website Organization is flooded, for example during a DDoS attack.
“It is not impossible that the website overloaded by a DDoS attack in turn overloads the internal database, which can no longer be used for customs terminals,” he explains, adding: “This is just one scenario.”
In any case, “it is problematic if there is actually a connection between the two (the attack and the ending problems),” Karim Ganame continues. In fact, this would be evidence that a “DDoS can impact and cripple a transportation and security system.”
According to him, Canadian authorities need to think about how best to respond to the NoName057 hackers.