A rain of cyberattacks falls on Hydro-Québec

The number of cybersecurity incidents has increased 16-fold since 2021, from 76 that year to 1,224 in 2024.

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“Regarding cyberattacks, these can take different forms. We can think of phishing emails or even denial of service attacks aimed at overloading a website to make it unavailable,” specifies Louis-Olivier Batty, spokesperson for Hydro-Québec.

No cyberattack to date has had an impact on the electricity network, dams or personal data of customers, he specifies.

Hydro-Québec does not have documents specifically compiling the number of cybersecurity incidents broken down by type of incident or the expenses related to each of them.

“Producing this information would require calculating or comparing data from several documents,” explains the company.

Hydro-Québec still provided the estimated number of threats or attempted attacks from outside of which the state-owned company was the victim for the years 2021 to 2024.

There were 76 cases recorded in 2021, 208 in 2022, 364 in 2023 and 1,224 in 2024 (as of December 16).

A case of espionage

“The increase in threats since 2022 is part of a context of significant increase in cyber threats around the world, which is leading companies like Hydro-Québec to deploy cutting-edge solutions,” says François Ramsay, of Hydro -Quebec.

The company has also significantly increased cybersecurity resources and staff in recent years and has implemented the required measures, according to industry best practices, he specifies.

“It is important to emphasize that due to the significant resources deployed by the company, these incidents are generally without consequences. The most significant events in recent years are an espionage case in November 2022 that led to an RCMP investigation and charges, as well as a denial of service attack in April 2023,” adds Mr. Ramsay.

We will remember that in 2022, Yuesheng Wang, a former employee of Hydro-Québec, was accused of espionage, obtaining industrial secrets, and fraud for having obtained industrial secrets on behalf of China.

Attacks every day

In 2019, Hydro-Québec already told Journal that it repelled attacks from computer hackers every day.

“It’s every day. We are victims of different attempts and we must remain very vigilant,” said Louis-Olivier Batty, spokesperson for Hydro-Québec.

Hackers who attack the Hydro-Québec network are looking for flaws to destabilize computer systems and cause power outages that would be harmful to the Quebec economy, he added.

Hydro-Québec then decided to create a complete, full-time monitoring team dedicated to this problem.

Number of threats or attempted attacks

• 2021: 76
• 2022: 208
• 2023: 364
• 2024: 1224