UPDATE: P.E.I. government confirms website crashed due to cyberattack
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CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. — The P.E.I. authorities is confirming a cyberattack triggered a crash of its web site.
In an e-mail to SaltWire, a consultant of the Division of Finance stated the web site was hobbled because of a denial-of-service assault, which includes attackers flooding an web server with site visitors to overwhelm it.
“There was no knowledge compromised by this cyberattack,” wrote Hillary MacDonald, a consultant of the Division of Finance. “The sort of cyberattack is just not distinctive, as different jurisdictions in Canada have skilled comparable assaults lately.”
The province’s official X (or Twitter) account introduced the web site was briefly unavailable at 9:20 a.m. on Sept. 14.
The web sites for presidency departments, together with Well being P.E.I. and the Public Faculties Department, look like down in addition to of 1:27 p.m.
Some websites of P.E.I. authorities crown companies, corresponding to Island Waste Administration, are at present functioning.
The pe.211.ca website, which isn’t a authorities web site however which lists authorities and group well being providers, is functioning. The location is a service of United Means of P.E.I.
MacDonald stated the province is working to revive the P.E.I. authorities web site as quickly as potential. She didn’t establish a particular on-line group which will have been the supply of the assault.
Thursday’s outage comes days earlier than the province is about to face the impacts of Hurricane Lee, forecast to be a post-tropical storm when it impacts P.E.I. this weekend. Forecasters have stated the storm’s impression shall be vital however seemingly not as extreme as final fall’s post-tropical storm Fiona.
The P.E.I. authorities was the goal of a ransomware assault in early 2020. That assault resulted in a complete price of $900,000 and resulted within the private info of purchasers of an agricultural enterprise danger administration program being posted on-line by a malicious group.
Stu Neatby is a political reporter with SaltWire in Prince Edward Island. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and adopted on X @stu_neatby.
