OTTAWA–Federal government networks blocked an average of 474 million hacking attempts per day over a 12-month period, a “top secret” memo to Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan reveals.The heavily-censored report, obtained by the Star under access to information law, stated federal cyber defences blocked an average of 474 million “malicious cyber activities” daily between July 2016 and July 2017.According to the Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s electronic spy and cyber defence agency, those “activities” run the gamut. They include any attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in Canadian cyber defences to gain access to government networks, devices or information.It’s not clear who’s behind those attacks, at least not from the censored version of the report released publicly, and single hackers or groups could be responsible for multiple malicious “activities.” But the sheer number of attempts gives a sense of the scale of the task ahead of CSE, which has recently been given responsibility for Ottawa’s overall cyber-defence efforts. “It’s not surprising to me. It’s in line with what I’ve heard both people from the government and people from public services talk about their systems being under constant threat,” said Stephanie MacLellan, a senior research associate on cybersecurity with the Centre for International Governance Innovation.“It’s not necessarily successful attacks, it’s not necessarily attempts at bringing down the entire system, this is just continuous probing of the system to look for vulnerabilities. I think it’s pretty standard.” Governments, in particular, tend to have a large target on their backs for hackers, MacLellan added.According to CSE, the majority of “malicious cyber activities” observed over the 12-month period were simply “reconnaissance scans” to detect vulnerabilities in ...
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