Thank you for the question.
In terms of specific examples of cyber-threats, I'll try to answer that in two parts. I'll talk briefly about the cyber-threat actors, because it's an important piece, and also about some of the cyber-threats we are seeing.
To speak briefly on the actors, there are sophisticated nation-states that target and try to infiltrate systems. There are non-state actors. We've seen the prevalence in recent months of reports that ISIL is developing cyber capabilities. There are state actors and non-state actors. There is cybercrime, as was raised by one of the other members of the committee a moment ago, and there is the rise of cybercriminals who look to steal information or to steal resources.
There are also examples of the so-called hacktivists. These are organizations or people who are trying to be disruptive, and who are trying to disrupt a government service or disrupt a system. There were examples in the last year. In terms of giving a concrete example of those people who are trying to be disruptive, there were a number of so-called denial-of-service attacks. Those are from people or organizations trying to flood the government systems with requests through a variety of systems that slow down or impede legitimate Canadians trying to do business with the government from being able to do so.
You can see that nuisance and threat activity, and you can see defacement of government websites. The earlier example that was raised was in terms of significant attacks that could be trying to steal intellectual property or trying to infiltrate systems to gain personal information. There was a significant cyber-attack recently with one of our partner countries, and what the cyber-attackers were trying to go after was personnel information, Government of Canada employees and other people who are working for the government.
To underline the point, it's a variety of different threat actors and a variety of different techniques that are being employed for a variety of different ends, all of which either are disrupting systems and trying to infiltrate information, or trying to steal information or shut down systems.
I hope that gives you a bit of an idea of the range of threats and actors we are seeing.