The Port of Halifax in Nova Scotia and the ports of Montreal and Quebec in the province of Quebec were hit by a cyber attack on Wednesday, but cargo continues to move at all three facilities. The ports’ websites have been taken out of commission. According to a report from CBC News, the external websites of the Port of Halifax were shut down by a denial-of-service attack. The port’s spokesperson Lane Farguson said, “What’s important is that our internal systems continue to operate normally and port operations have not been affected by this. Traffic continues to move through the Port of Halifax.” The websites of the Port of Montreal and Port of Quebec are also offline. Both ports report that operations are not affected and there has been no data breach.

The enisa tool allows port operators to conduct cyber risk management with a four-phase approach which follows common principles of risk management. The approach is also compatible with the steps of the risk assessment methodology of the ISPS code. Port operators can navigate through this tool going through the phases in order or starting at any of the four phases, identify security measures based on their priorities and assess their maturity in the implementation of these measures. Reachout to SIMS if you want to know more about the tool application.