Update on Government of Yukon service outages due to cyberattack

On September 14, the Government of Yukon experienced a cyberattack targeted at Yukon.ca resulting in services being intermittent or unavailable from approximately 12 am to 4 pm. The attack is continuing, however, efforts to mitigate the attack have been effective and approximately 90 per cent of government services were restored by the morning of September 15. There is no evidence that this attack resulted in any unauthorized access to private citizen data, government systems or government files.

The type of attack is a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack. These types of cyberattacks send abnormally high levels of traffic to our network to overwhelm our systems but they do not try to access information.

In addition to shutting down service to Yukon.ca, the attack resulted in impacts to the Government of Yukon’s ability to access the internet and some of our internet-based services. This internal outage lasted approximately from 10 am to 2 pm.

We take this attack seriously and are working with the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and our federal, provincial and territorial counterparts to assess next steps and further improve our response to this type of attack. We have also been in contact with the RCMP to facilitate any investigations they may undertake.