Laurentian still offering little information about ‘cyber incident’

More than a month after its IT systems were devastated, Laurentian University is still offering little information about the ‘cyber incident’ that caused the crisis.

Officials declined an interview request Thursday with CTV Northern Ontario, which sought answers to such questions as whether it was a cyber attack and not just an incident, and whether a ransom was demanded. Laurentian has said that personal information was stolen from students and personnnel at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and the Living with Lakes Centre/Co-operative Freshwater Ecology Unit.

Cyber attacks have become increasingly common in the province, such as one on the City of Hamilton around the same time as Laurentian was affected.

The Hamilton ransomware attack took place Feb. 25 and has plagued city services, including telephone lines, transit schedules, tax services and Ontario Works and Special Supports.

"The demand was a whole hell of a lot of money," Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath said at a news conference March 15. The mayor could not say how much the hackers wanted, but added, "It was a huge ask."

The City of Huntsville suffered a similar attack earlier this month.

In Toronto, the Public Library and the City's Zoo are still trying to recover from attacks in October and January that exposed sensitive employee information.

And while not an attack, it emerged in January that Greater Sudbury was the victim of cyber fraud when it paid $1.5 million to a scammer instead of a city contractor.

Declined interview request

Since its cyber incident, however, Laurentian has revealed little about what happened beyond updates on service restoration.

In response to a request for an interview, the university instead sent CTV News a statement attributed to Sylvie C. Lafontaine, LU’s VP of finance and administration.

"The investigation into exactly what took place will take multiple months to properly analyze and measures have been taken to increase cyber security,” Lafontaine’s statement said.

“For example, new cyber security software has been installed on all computers. This was a tremendous undertaking, installing the software on thousands of computers. The recovery is ongoing, most systems are now online, and we are grateful for the significant efforts of our IT team and external partners who have supported us."

The statement didn’t say when answers would be made available.