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Former CSE chief Greta Bossenmaier told the public safety committee last March that CSE was blocking about one billion “malicious attempts” per day on government servers but those numbers were in reference to reconnaissance scans on the servers. Those attempts are blocked automatically and don’t require further action.

Scott Jones, the director of CSE’s cyber centre, said in January that it’s unlikely a hostile country will disrupt Canadian life with a cyber attack.

“Absent a major international conflict, we said the threat of disruption was very low, in terms of the threat to Canadian infrastructure,” said Jones, at a January public safety committee hearing. More likely, hostile countries would be looking siphon out private information rather than make direct attacks, he said.

CSE tabled the new numbers in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Guy Lauzon, who asked the organization to provide information on “cyberattacks on government departments and agencies.”

The figure doesn’t include the final two months of 2018, but shows incidents on “government administration” networks spiking to 537, a 40-per-cent increase from the previous year’s complete numbers. If the attacks continued at the same pace in 2018, the government administration incidents would have risen by 63 per cent.

CSE wan’t able to provide complete numbers for 2018, but warned that the numbers can highly variable from month to month, which would make these kind of estimates hard to pin down. CSE also refused to be more specific about where the “government administration” incidents were occurring or provide more information on them, saying it could give malicious actors valuable information about the organization’s cyber response. Despite a request from the Post, Jones was unavailable for an interview due to a “fully booked schedule.”