At first glance it is an image of a group of colleagues who have just won a million in the lottery.
However, this check for $999,239, owned by the director of the Cégep de Saint-Félicien and his IT manager, represents a reimbursement of the costs that this institution had to incur to fend off the ransomware attack carried out by one of the worst Canadian computer hackers , Gatineau resident Sébastien, was started by Vachon-Desjardins.
In an interview with Enquête a year ago, Sylvie Prescott recounted how this attack crippled her CEGEP at the start of the 2020 school year, when staff were already exhausted dealing with the effects of the pandemic.
Although the majority of victims choose to pay cybercriminals to recover their valuable computer data, Ms. Prescott fundamentally concluded that this was out of the question. For weeks, Cégep employees worked with experts from a specialist company to rebuild the facility’s computer network.
A police investigation by the FBI and RCMP revealed that this fraud was perpetrated by the criminal organization NetWalker, a collective of computer hackers. Among them was Gatineau resident Sébastien Vachon-Desjardins, who extorted more than $30 million in just one year and was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Florida a year ago. Vachon-Desjardins was recruited into this criminal organization while working as a daytime civil servant for the federal government in Ottawa.
The refund received by this Lac-Saint-Jean CEGEP almost three years after the attack represents a portion of the Bitcoins confiscated by authorities and resold to compensate some of the Canadian victims of the cyberattacks.
The director of the Cégep de Saint-Félicien explains that the amounts received cover the costs of Equifax’s IT experts and the credit monitoring program of her students. Further legal proceedings are underway in the United States to distribute the remainder of the millions confiscated from Sébastien Vachon-Desjardins in Gatineau among victims around the world.