Canadian officials have assured nationals on Monday that online security breach into the Canadian government website has not affected the data to the extent expected. Hackers targeted Statistics Canada website but the breach could not damage the information stored in the database.
Communications Security Establishment's IT security assistant deputy minister Scott Jones confirmed that no harm was done to the data stored in the database. He added that it was quite early to say what sources backed the hacking attempts. However, Jones confirmed that the attack to the Canadian government website was successful. He described it as "target of convenience - just some random hacker giving it a shot."
"There were no other compromises to our knowledge, and believe me, we were all over this," Canadian ITbranch Shared Services Canada's Chief Operating Officer John Glowacki said as quoted by The Star. "We're confident that we've prevented government information, including the personal information of Canadians, from being released."
With the online security breach of the Canadian government website, Canada Revenue Agency website also had to witness a sudden shutdown. This came following the risk imposed to several other government websites around the nation. The online breach incident came into focus on Wednesday when the technical experts doubted some unwanted activity been taken place.
Glowacki said that most of the Canadian government websites used website design software Apache Struts 2. According to Engadget, only Statistics Canada and Canada Revenue Agency used the version of the software that was vulnerable to hacking risks. Glowacki identified as the software version as a gateway for potential hackers.
The technical experts claimed that it was quite easier for hackers to breach the Apache security rules. It was last Monday when Cisco Systems Inc. Suggested that Struts 2 was quite vulnerable. However, the Canadian government officials said that they did not identify any threat to their online system until Wednesday. In addition, the authorities have raised doubts over many more future attacks on the websites that might prove to be far more harmful for the nation.
