The LCBO says their website and mobile apps are currently unavailable as a result of a cybersecurity incident.
The outage begun sometime around Tuesday mid-afternoon. In a statement on Twitter, the government agency said that in-store customer service has not been affected.
“We’re working to bring them back online and thank you for your patience and understanding,” they said on Twitter.
The LCBO said it was investigating, but did not specify if the incident was caused by a ransomware attack — an attack where a hacker takes over a company or institution’s computer network, encrypts the files, then forces them to pay before they can regain control or access their own data.
According to Check Point Research, cyberattacks increased in Canada by 20 per cent last year. The firm said health care, finance and government industries were the hardest hit in 2022.
In 2021, Canadian companies paid more than $600 million to recover their digital assets due to ransomware attacks, according to Statistics Canada, up from $400 million in 2019.
Recently, the Hospital for Sick Children experience a “code grey” outage that compromised its network. SickKids was hit by a ransomware attack that began on Dec. 18. As of Jan. 5, it had recovered 80 per cent of its priority systems.
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