The hacker collective Anonymous is taking credit for a massive cyber-attack on the federal government that made multiple government websites go dark this afternoon — apparently in protest against the Harper government’s controversial security legislation, C-51.

“A bill which is a clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as removing our legal protections enshrined in the Magna Carta for 800 years,” reads the script for an Anonymous video posted on YouTube. “Perhaps it was fate that the day the Magna Carta arrived in our country to go on display to the populace that our corrupt government was symbolically pissing upon it and us all.”

The video goes on to say that C-51 targets minorities and forces Canadians to trade privacy for security.

“Today, Anons risked their freedoms for you. We now ask that you follow suit. Stand for your rights, take to the streets and protest this 20th of June,” says the narrator.

“We will not allow our freedoms to be stripped one by one.”

Almost immediately after the hack, one Twitter user who calls himself Blakeando10 and is pictured wearing a Guy Fawkes mask — an image commonly associated with hacking and Anonymous — took credit. His tweet — “It was your move Senators, now it’s ours … we’re just getting started”, using the hashtags #RejectFear and #StopC51.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement said the impact of the attack was widespread.

“It affected e-mail as well as other critical infrastructure and so it is more widespread than just e-mail servers.”

Clement indicated the attack may have also damaged some government information technology systems.

“I think we’re still repairing. The attack is now finished but there is repair work that has to be done that will take some time.”

Clement said he did not yet know whether the attackers were able to access any data on the government computer systems.

“Not to my knowledge but again, more information will be forthcoming as we assess.”

Clement said the government’s computer systems are constantly under attack from a variety of sources.

“Quite frankly there are incursions practically every day of every year. Usually those incursions are unsuccessful but they come from a number of different sources and so we always have to try to make our sites and our information as impervious to attack as possible. Usually that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Today was a day when it didn’t work.”

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney assured reporters that no personal information was compromised during the attack. He said officials are trying to determine who is behind the attack and how to stop future ones.

Blaney said there is no place for cyber attacks in Canada’s political debate.

“There is no justification for attacking public property in our country. There are several ways of expressing your point of view in a democratic way. But all those who break the law will face the law.”

The first government confirmation of the attack came from Clement who tweeted just before the video was released, confirming that Government of Canada’s servers had been cyber-attacked.

By 3 p.m. ET, most of the websites were back online but it took two more hours before the government said anything about what had happened.

Shortly before 5 p.m., the Acting Chief Information Officer for the Treasury Board of Canada sent out a brief message reading: “The Government of Canada websites were affected by a denial of service attack, impacting e-mail, internet access and information technology assets.

“We are working on restoring services as soon as possible. We continue to be vigilant in monitoring any potential vulnerabilities.”

Ray Boisvert, the former assistant director of intelligence at CSIS, says the attack was meant to communicate a message and that there isn’t much that could have been done to prevent it, given the nature of government Internet sites.

“At the end of the day, these open government networks are vulnerable to these kind of things,” he said. “They’re very accessible and they let in a lot of traffic because they have to manage large volumes … companies can afford to be a bit more selective about which emails get through their servers. It’s more difficult for governments.”

Boisvert said this style of attack doesn’t suggest a foreign state was the culprit.

“We’re in the age of the democratization of power. Small actors can do big things. The state no longer holds monopoly on the use of force,” he said.

Liberal defence critic Joyce Murray said Wednesday’s cyber attack should be a wake-up call for the Canadian government. She said experts have warned MPs that Canada ‎isn’t doing enough to protect against cyber attacks.

“This confirms what people who have expertise in cyber conflict and cyber defence have been telling us in committee and outside, that we do not, in Canada, have an adequate cross-ministry cyber strategy.”

NDP MP Randall Garrison said cyber attacks are a serious concern that the government hasn’t been taking seriously enough.

“All we hear from the government is that they have a strategy but clearly the strategy isn’t working.”

Today’s attack came just days after the House of Commons warned employees on Friday that they had been hit with a cyber-attack. The House of Commons later insisted that no data was stolen.

Ottawa-based hacker Nadeem Douba, who has advised governments on security issues, told iPolitics the hack was not very sophisticated.

“A denial of service attack is pretty easy to execute with very little financial backing,” Douba said in an email. “I’ve seen distributed denial of service services being sold on the black market for as low as $100 per day. These services can be easily bought over IRC or some websites on the dark web. Nothing special here so far.”

“It definitely is more about optics than anything else,” he added. “If we were looking at a denial of service attack similar in nature to StuxNet, where critical infrastructure was impacted, then I would consider it more of a security threat. The same could be said if the attack were able to create any kind of political unrest or economic instability.

“However, as far as we know now, this attack is more of a nuisance than anything else.”

With files from Elizabeth Thompson and Amanda Connolly

@Claire_Wahlen

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