Sask. government unsure of source of cyberattack

REGINA — The Saskatchewan government says it has been hit with a cyberattack, but one expert suspects it’s unrelated to the malware that has sought to extort money from companies, government agencies and other organizations around the world in recent days.

The province said Monday its network was flooded with traffic on the weekend that caused a two-hour outage on the Saskatchewan.ca website and other system-related issues.

“Our security team is still assessing the situation to calculate exactly where this is coming from and what the nature of the attack is,” Richard Murray, deputy minister of Central Services, said in Regina.

He said it has not been determined whether it’s related to the rash of ransomware sweeping the globe.

Malware dubbed WannaCry for the WannaCrypt software used to execute it has affected an estimated 300,000 machines in about 150 countries since Friday.

A Toronto-area hospital said Saturday it appeared ransomware threatened its computer system, but it was able to deflect the attack.

Murray said the Saskatchewan government has not received a ransom demand so far.

The attack against the Saskatchewan government appears to be a distributed-denial-of-service attack, said Eric Jardine, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, based in Waterloo, Ont.

The WannaCry attack perpetrators are out to make money, suggested Jardine, who also teaches political science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

“To change that tactic all of a sudden and to target a government with a distributed-denial-of-service attack seems like a weird shift, so I suspect they aren’t related,” he said.

“I suspect it’s just two separate things that both happened to involve computers.”