Are hacks like Nova Scotia Power’s ransomware attack the new normal? | #ransomware | #cybercrime

Article content

I am of two minds about Netflix’s 2023 movie Leave the World Behind: happy to have seen it because it is so well made but also mildly regretful because it in has left my universe a little askew.

The storyline: a family rents a high-end Airbnb and soon discovers that there has been a massive cyberattack disabling all digital communication.

I have been thinking about the flick a bit since Nova Scotia Power’s data hack was reported.

Article content

A considerable poetic license is being utilized here. After the movie’s cyberattack, chaos ensues – planes fall from the sky, container ships run amok, animals do strange things.

Thus far it is life as usual in Nova Scotia since the NSP hack, although data breaches, for a huge variety of reasons, are never a good thing.

The link, in my view, between real life and the movie is that both remind us how tech-reliant our lives have become and what happens when things go awry.

Data breaches and hacks, like the ransomware attack that hit Nova Scotia Power, are becoming a way of life for us.

“Cyber threats to Canada are becoming more complex and sophisticated, threatening our national security and economic prosperity,” Canada’s then-defence minister Bill Blair wrote last year in the country’s National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026.

Article content

“As a nation with a significant global presence, Canada is a valuable target for cybercriminals looking to make a profit and state adversaries aiming to disrupt the systems we rely on.”

Examples are easy to find.

In 2019, a breach compromised the personal data of 15 million customers of LifeLabs, a Canadian laboratory diagnostic services provider. The breach was blamed on the company’s failure to install some critical software protection.

LifeLabs subsequently paid a ransom to retrieve the stolen data and later had to fork over settlement of between $4.9 million and $9.8 million to some of its customers.

That same year a breach at the financial services outfit Desjardins Group exposed the personal and financial details of nearly 9.7 million customers.

In the fall of 2021, a ransomware attack caused IT outages across Newfoundland and Labrador’s health care system, forcing thousands of appointments, including cancer care, to be cancelled and delayed.

Article content

We, in this province, aren’t immune.

In June 2023, hackers took advantage of vulnerabilities in the file transfer service MOVEit, to steal the names, social insurance numbers, addresses, educational backgrounds, personal health information and banking information of more than 93 million employees of some 2,700 organizations around the world.

Among those affected were 100,000 current and past Nova Scotia government employees.

A year after the breach, the Nova Scotia government announced that it had spent $3.8 million to shore up its cybersecurity defences.

An investigation by Nova Scotia’s Information and Privacy Commissioner found that the provincial government had failed to comply with its legal obligation to ensure reasonable security and information practices before the attack.

The fur may fly after the Nova Scotia Power breach, which, as far as we know, has compromised the data of approximately 280,000 NSP customers, even if the only direct impact thus far is a halt on billing.

Article content

The thought of all that personal information – including bank accounts and social insurance numbers – is floating around out on the dark web is an unsettling one.

So, you can understand how the manner in which technology is embroiled in our daily lives has become the stuff of dystopian films and novels.

I know that technology, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, “is indistinguishable from magic.” Without it many of us would die young, or at the very least, shiver hungry in the cold, living small, bleak, nasty lives.

There can be no argument that the internet makes us all geniuses, with the knowledge of the ages at our fingertips.

Article content

But will our brains, like underused muscles, start to atrophy when all it takes to hunt down a fact is a quick word with our friend AI rather than personally running a finger down a page in a book.

Isn’t life diminished rather than improved when instead of remembering the name of a song we just hum it into an app?

It is a little sad that the descendants of the men and women who settled this vast, wild unpopulated country with their own two hands are now helpless as children when the Wi-Fi goes down?

And because of what technology does for us, we may someday lose the ability to do basic things like write our names, open a door, drive a car or read.

But that’s progress, isn’t it? And for that there is usually a price that must be paid, even if we are unaware of it.

Article content