The Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, ON and several of its affiliates have been targeted by a mysterious cyberattack that has left their systems inaccessible.
Malware had been detected on the university’s systems on July 03, 2020, and also temporarily disabled the RMC’s online network. It was later found that the cyberattack also affected RMC Saint-Jean in Quebec, the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, and the Chief Warrant Officer Robert Osside Institute.
A blog post from RMC dean of engineering and associate professor of software engineering Greg Phillips explained that the malware exploits vulnerabilities in cyber security to install itself in affected systems, then encrypts the systems’ stored data to prevent users from accessing them.
The college dean also warned RMC network users not to proliferate the malware.
“Do not do anything to a computer that is connected to the RMC network,” Phillips said in his blog post. “Do not turn it on, do not turn it off, do not reboot it, do not try to log in, and do not connect an external drive or USB key. Any of these actions could potentially make the situation worse.”
Phillips gave assurances that the college’s core services will be restored over the next few days, but a complete recovery could take weeks.
While Phillips identified the cyber incident as a ransomware attack, Queen’s University professor of computing David Skillicorn said that the nature of the malware has yet to be properly confirmed.
“I think we don’t know for sure that it’s ransomware. The more interesting question is: Were they asked to pay a ransom? If they weren’t, then this is probably the effort by some other country to embarrass the Canadian government rather than to make money,” Skillicorn told Kingstonist News.
