Cyberattacks hit military, Parliament websites as India hacker group targets Canada

OTTAWA –

The federal government is coping with apparent cyberattacks this week, as a hacker group in India claims it has sowed chaos in Ottawa.

The Canadian Armed Forces says that its website became unavailable to mobile users midday Wednesday, but was fixed within a few hours.

The military says the site is separate from other government sites, such as the one used by the Department of Defence, and the incident remains under investigation.

Various pages on the House of Commons website are continuing to load slowly or incompletely due to an ongoing attack that officials say started Monday morning.

The Commons administration says it’s facing a distributed denial-of-service attack, which is when bots swarm a website with multiple visits and cause it to stop loading properly.

A hacking group named Indian Cyber Force has claimed responsibility for the incident involving the military, and appears to have managed to infiltrate a handful of websites owned by small businesses in Canada.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 28, 2023.