A cyber attack has temporarily shut down the Saskatchewan government’s website and internal email, but officials say services are continuing with “some minor glitches.”
Saskatchewan.ca went down for about two hours Sunday night, and the government’s email and Internet access was disrupted Monday morning.
Central Services deputy minister Richard Murray says it appears to be a denial-of-service attack, in which external firewalls are flooded with traffic from multiple sources, slowing systems down.
Murray says 11,000 computers used by various government ministries were affected.
“No mail or network system is safe from these sorts of attacks,” Murray told a media scrum Monday.
He says government services are continuing with “some minor glitches.”
“We’re not seeing any day-to-day impacts at the moment,” Murray said.
Officials have not yet confirmed whether the attack is linked to the WannaCry ransomware that since Friday has targeted computer systems in 150 countries. The malware locks computer systems until a ransom payment is made.
The Saskatchewan government has not yet received a ransom request, Murray said.
“We haven’t had to deal with that yet and I hope we don’t have to,” he said.
“We have all of our data backed up and so, I would suggest that we could always go back to our backups and restore systems from an earlier date if we have to.”
Murray says security teams are still working to assess the situation and patch up systems.
