SQ investigating hack of Terrasse-Vaudreuil website
The town, located on the northwestern tip of Île Perrot, doesn't have a municipal arena, or a grocery store, but it has somehow attracted the attention of hackers who claim to be doing the work of Allah.
Article content
Despite a continuing investigation by the Sûreté du Québec, town officials and experts say there’s little to worry about after a group claiming to have connections with Islamic extremists hacked Terrasse-Vaudreuil’s website Thursday night.
“I believe it was completely random, like the thousands of other times it’s happened around the world,” said town general manager Ron Kelley. “I guess today was just our day.”
The small municipality on Île-Perrot has about 2,000 residents. Town council was first alerted about the hack around 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, and the website was restored around 7:45 a.m. Friday.
The group behind the attack calls itself the Middle East Cyber Army. The message left on the website’s home page said the group works for Allah, and that Islam “always will dominate.” It also mentioned the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack from earlier this month, and ended with the hashtag #OPFRANCE.
French officials mentioned a group that goes by the same name as a suspect after 19,000 French websites were recently hit by cyberattacks.
Kelley couldn’t fathom why the small town would have been targeted.
“We have no problems or conflicting issues, no cultural issues, we don’t get political,” he said. “This had nothing to do with the municipality.”
He added though many called in to alert the town of the website’s changes, no residents showed any signs of real concern or panic.
The town is not worried there was any breach of private information with the attack, Kelley noted. “It only touched our website, which is run on a server from a private company outside of city hall,” he said.
Sûreté du Québec spokesperson for the Montérégie area, Ingrid Asselin, said police quickly started an investigation, in part because of the nature of the message. She said personally she couldn’t think of any similar cases involving hacked town websites in the area. Because the investigation was continuing, she couldn’t comment on any theories police were working on.
Terry Cutler, who founded Montreal-based IT security firm Digital Locksmiths, said he highly doubted the hack was anything more than the result of a random search for web servers with lower security requirements.
“They probably did a search on Google, or any search engine, that came up with a specific version of a web server or specific code inside someone’s website,” he said.
From there, he said, the group or person could have launched a script and tried to compromise “hundreds of thousands” of websites all at the same time.
“I doubt they even know what Terrasse-Vaudreuil is,” Cutler said. “They did a search, saw all these vulnerable websites, and thought ‘let’s go deface everybody and try to get our name out there,’ ” he said.
Cutler chalked it up to the equivalent of someone spraying graffiti on private property.
Cutler’s firm is hired to legally break into different companies’ computer systems to help find “all the holes before the bad guys do.”
Cutler estimated he could hack into Terrasse-Vaudreuil’s website in less than an hour.
It’s a problem, he said, that plagues small businesses and municipalities alike: thinking they’re too small to be the target of an attack.
“It’s what we hear 99 per cent of the time,” he said.
“But in a case like this,” Cutler added, “even if Terrasse-Vaudreuil wasn’t targeted specifically, it can still look bad to the public.”
