Government site targeted by denial of service attack

As the world deals with cyber attacks, the Saskatchewan government was not immune.

The government’s website was a victim of a denial of service attack. The attack happens when a program targets a website and overloads it with traffic, causing it to shut down.

Richard Murray, deputy minister of Central Services, said the attack shut down the website for a few hours Sunday night and again Monday morning.

“No mail or network system is safe from these sort of attacks,” Murray said.

He said the government can’t confirm if the attack is related to the WannaCry ransomware attacks that have affected 150 countries in the world.

Murray said there have been some internal impacts felt, being unable to send emails outside of the government and internet access within the ministry.

The ministry has backup copies of the data available to them.

“We could always go back to our backups and restore systems from an earlier date if we had to.”

Murray also said there is no reason to believe anyone’s personal information was stolen.

“Those are our most secure systems certainly and would not be prone to this type of attack.”

Murray said that everything appeared to return to normal later Monday morning and they are prepared if another attack happens.