Canada’s signals intelligence agency has denied that it was hit by a cyberattack on Thursday, saying its website was “functional and accessible” all day.
A spokesperson for the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) said the agency’s website was not offline at all.
“The CSE site (www.cse-cst.gc.ca) has been functional and accessible all day today,” Ryan Foreman said in an email to CTV News.
But a source told CTV’s Mercedes Stephenson that earlier Thursday, a hacker went after a “dead end” web address that the CSE owns but does not use. The source added that the problem had been fixed.
The defunct CSE website was the latest Canadian government-affiliated site to go offline in an apparent cyberattack.
Earlier this week, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) website went offline three times within 24 hours, in an apparent denial-of-service hack. A rogue hacker using the name “Aerith” has claimed responsibility for the CSIS outages.
The CSE is administered by National Defence, and has not been previously targeted in the latest round of cyberattacks.
