A group of hackers calling themselves the “Indian Cyber Force” claimed responsibility on Thursday for crashing the official website of the Canadian Armed Forces.
The group rebuked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his “allegations and anti-India politics,” a reference to Trudeau accusing the Indian government of assassinating Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil.
A media spokesman for Canada’s Department of National Defense told the Globe and Mail that a “disruption” of the armed forces website began around noon on Wednesday and was “rectified later that afternoon.”
“We have no indication of broader impacts to our systems,” spokesman Daniel Le Bouthillier said. He added that Canada’s armed forces are jointly investigating the hack, which appeared to be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) operation – an effort to push a website offline temporarily by overloading it with traffic, rather than a penetration of security.
“Given current geopolitical tensions, Canadian organizations – and organizations everywhere, for that matter – should assume that these attacks will continue,” Emsisoft cybersecurity researcher Brett Callow told the UK Telegraph on Wednesday.
“They’re cheap, easy to carry out, and highly visible. That makes them the perfect tool for hacktivists or, in some cases, states’ cyber operations,” Callow said.
The Indian Cyber Force, which has no confirmed links to the Indian government, threatened a cyberattack against the Canadian government the day before the Canadian Armed Forces site went down.
“Get ready to feel the power,” the group warned. “Indian Cyber Force attacks will be launching on Canadian cyber space … it’s for the mess you started.”
The hackers used their Telegram account to take responsibility for crashing the Canadian Armed Forces website and several others, using the hashtag “F##kCanada.”
The “mess” referred to by the hackers was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s public accusation on September 18 that India’s government orchestrated the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a member of an organization called the Khalistani Movement that wants to carve an independent Sikh state out of Indian territory.
Nijar was gunned down outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia on June 18. The Indian government has denounced him as an extremist and terrorist but claims it had no role in his murder. Canada and India have been embroiled in an escalating diplomatic feud ever since Trudeau made his accusation, and India’s normally fractious political scene has been largely united in expressing its fury at Trudeau.