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“There’s more and more hacking, year after year,” said Vanessa Coiteux, a lawyer in the Montreal office of Stikeman Elliott LLP. “I think Goldcorp is a good example that every company is at risk.”

Garofalo declined to comment on the specifics of the Goldcorp hack. But he noted it has become commonplace for hackers to steal private data from companies and then try to extort money from them in exchange for keeping it confidential.

“In general, these sorts of circumstances are driven by monetary motives,” he said.

The Daily Dot noted the hackers said they are planning “several” more data dumps of Goldcorp’s private information.

“The next dump will include 14 months of company wide emails, emails containing some good old fashion corporate racism, sexism, and greed,” the hackers wrote, according to the website.

The Goldcorp hack is one of a series of well-publicized securities breaches in Canada and the United States. Target Corp., for example, has paid more than US$250 million in costs related to a 2013 data breach in its operations, though US$90 million of this was covered by insurance. The most famous hack of recent years happened to Sony Corp. in 2014. The hack was a response to The Interview, a Sony film that mocked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In a new trend, hackers have been targeting hospitals so they can access confidential medical records and hold that information for ransom.

Goldcorp is not the only victim in Canada’s mining sector. Detour Gold Corp. was hacked last year by a group that claimed to be from Russia.