Cyberattack that paralyzed the Hydro-Quebec website has been resolved

Hydro-Quebec's website attacked First the ice storm, now hackers have attacked Hydro-Quebec's website, but the utility says customer's private information is safe.

Access to Hydro-Québec's website and application was restored early Friday after a 24-hour paralysis caused by a cyberattack.

The outage occurred around 3:00 a.m. on Thursday. For several hours, any attempt to access the www.hydroquebec.com address resulted in a page indicating that the site was inaccessible.

The site was hit by a denial of service attack, which occurs when a website is flooded with requests to prevent it from functioning.

A spokesperson for Hydro-Quebec, Francis Labbé, said Thursday that the company's critical systems were unaffected and no data or personal information was leaked.

Labbé said Hydro-Quebec has a cybersecurity team of about 300.

The incident at Hydro-Quebec was one in a series of cyberattacks by pro-Russian groups targeting Canadian organizations in recent days.

In Quebec, the Port of Montreal, Port de Québec, Laurentian Bank, the graphics card manufacturer Matrox in Dorval, and the Prévost bus company were affected.

The attacks also affected the website of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the Port Authorities of Halifax, Nova Scotia and Port Alberni, British Columbia.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on April 14, 2023.