Freedom-of-information website breached, Halifax man arrested

Halifax police have charged a 19-year-old Halifax man following a breach of Nova Scotia’s freedom-of-information web portal — a problem that went unnoticed until a provincial employee made a typing error, government officials confirmed Wednesday.

Police Supt. Jim Perrin said the suspect is facing a charge of unauthorized use of a computer and was released on a promise to appear in court at a later date.

“It’s a seldom-laid charge,” Perrin told a news conference at police headquarters, adding that officers had seized computers as the result of a search earlier in the day.

In all, about 7,000 documents were inappropriately accessed between March 3 and March 5, Internal Services Minister Patricia Arab said Wednesday.

“This is not great news,” she said.

The admission came nearly a week after the problem was first noticed and the portal was shut down on April 5.

Deputy minister Jeff Conrad said the government filed a complaint with police the next day.

He confirmed that thousands of people could have been affected.

Officials said about 250 of the documents contained highly sensitive personal information including birthdates, social insurance numbers, addresses and government services’ client information. Credit card information was not accessed, they said.

Conrad said the breach was detected by a provincial employee, but it was a fluke.

“The employee was involved in doing some research on the site and inadvertently made an entry to a line on the site — made a typing error and identified that they were seeing documents they should not have seen,” Conrad told a technical briefing.

Officials said the documents were accessed through a “vulnerability in the system.”