Tens of Thousands of government accounts hacked in Canada

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Tens of 1000s of online government accounts belonging to Canada’s GCKey services were hacked in July this year. And that includes those belonging to Canada’s Revenue Services, The Treasury Board of Canada and 30 other federal departments.

Reports are in that a joint investigation taken up by Canadian government along with the law enforcement agencies have found the source of the attack and are now busy finding the motive behind the incident.

Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that passwords and user names of nearly 9,061 GCKey Holders were breached in the cyber attack, after which the credentials were used to access various government services in a fradulent way.

Canada has announced that all the affected accounts will be canceled, and all related departments will be asked to create new user accounts with added security. However, it was noticed that the cyber crooks altered the records of Canadian Emergency Benefit services meant to financial assist the populace during the COVID 19 outbreak. But the fund transfer was blocked at the right moment by the government officials.

To protect the data related to the taxpayers, over 5,500 Canada Revenue Agency Accounts was also targeted in the incident, making the authorities cancel all those accounts last week.

According to a source from News Resource CBC, the government authorities of Canada were alerted by some tax payers that their banking accounts linked to the Canada Revenue Agency accounts on a respective note have been altered and the leaking source seems to be the servers of the federal agencies.

The alert immediately prompted the officials to launch a probe, and this made them discover the cyber attack that took place on the servers of GCKey.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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