The Canadian Armed Forces are investigating a possible hack of its recruitment website, after visitors attempting to access the website were redirected to the Chinese government homepage.
Visitors to forces.ca/en/home Thursday were immediately redirected to gov.cn for a short time before the site began displaying an error message instead.
“The Department of National Defence has positive control over the site and we are currently looking at options to re-activate,” Daniel Le Bouthillier, a spokesperson for DND said in a statement Friday afternoon. “In the meantime, we are working towards creating an interim page on our main site in order to provide Canadians with continued access to recruitment information.”
The preliminary assessment points to the fact that the redirection was achieved by manipulating the Domain Name Service (DNS) and not the website itself, Le Bouthillier said.
“There has been no operational impact, DND/CAF infrastructure was not affected and there are no indications that any of our data was accessed,” Le Bouthillier said.
Government officials refused to point fingers or speculate who might be behind the site redirection.
The CAF recruiting website is temporarily offline. We are looking into it and will keep you updated.
— Canadian Forces (@CanadianForces) 17 November 2016
The recruiting website was still unavailable Friday afternoon.
The military’s main website, forces.gc.ca, appears to be operating as usual.
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