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Canadians now live in two worlds — the physical and the virtual — that increasingly meld into each other as the Internet of Things takes hold of the ordinary objects of daily life — cars, homes, and, yes, even clothes and toothbrushes.

Major sectors of the Canadian economy are also now largely managed by platforms that operate on the internet. Affected infrastructure includes roads, railways, water and sewage treatment plants, air traffic control, banks, pipelines, and energy grids. Without the internet, educational institutions, businesses, and governments would quickly grind to a halt. But all of these sectors are also vulnerable to cyber attacks.

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Like cancer, cyber attacks can take many different forms. They can be distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where an army of bots shuts down a website by overwhelming its servers with access requests that cause the system to crash (although such attacks typically do not actually gain access to the data contained on the servers of the website itself), or they might involve sinister phishing attacks, where a user inadvertently downloads malware through an email or a website that disables the operating system of a computer or an entire network. If the network is responsible for managing and storing sensitive financial data or for operating critical infrastructure, such as an oil or gas pipeline, a transportation system, or a nuclear power plant, the damage from a well-planned cyber attack can cause major disruptions and perhaps even a major loss of life. This is no mere idle speculation. A Russian attack on Ukraine’s eastern power grid in 2015 left many without heat or light in the midst of a very cold winter.