Computer problems that hit Port Moody Police Department and PoMo Public Library aren’t related to a recent rash of ransomware attacks on government computer systems in Nunavut and several communities in Ontario.
PoMo Police Const. Jason Maschke said the department’s computer systems should be functioning normally by Monday afternoon after they were felled by a virus that was first detected more than a week earlier, on Oct. 26. The virus shut down the department’s email system as well as its ability to carry out criminal record checks.
But the department’s management of its police records was unaffected, Maschke said, as was its ability to respond to emergency and non-emergency calls.
Maschke said while the department’s information technologists haven’t yet determined the origin of the virus, it has served as a wakeup call.
“We’re going to have to up our security protocol,” he said. “Even the police can be prone to a security attack.”
Meanwhile, a problem that shut down the shared computer network at PoMo library and city hall for about 30 minutes last Friday has been identified as a hardware failure and not a virus, according to Raman Braich, the city’s manager of information services. He said there was no evidence that failure was the result of a malicious attack.
But he added that the city is aware of the incidents that have affected other communities “and we continuously evaluate and adjust our policies and procedures as required.”
Nov. 2, Nunavut Premier Joe Savikataaq posted a message on Twitter that the territory’s IT system “was hacked early this morning by a virus that has targeted public services.”
A news release issued the next day confirmed it was a “new and sophisticated type of ransomware” that “encrypted individual files on various servers and work stations.”
In September, the city of Woodstock, Ont. had to shut down its computer systems after an apparent cyberattack similar to one that had affected systems in Stratford, Ont. last April.
In 2018, the Ontario towns of Midland and Wasaga Beach paid thousands of dollars to cyber criminals to unlock their computer systems that had been infected by ransomware.
According to the RCMP, ransomware is malicious software that infects a computer system and denies its users access to the system or the data it contains until a sum of money has been paid to unlock the encryption. It said there was almost 3,000 such attacks across Canada in 2016, but that “many incidents still go unreported.”
