Mr. Chair and members of the committee, good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
I am a research fellow at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair in Strategic and Diplomatic Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. My research focuses on issues related to cyber-strategy, cyber-defence and more generally on the impacts of information technology on international security.
In 2020 the research team that I'm part of launched a database dedicated to publicly recording geopolitical cyber-incidents targeting Canada, whether it be its government entities, its companies, its research institutions or its civil society. Our feeling at the time was that geopolitical cyber-incidents in Canada were quick to make headlines but were even quicker to be forgotten. We felt that the Canadian public was not fully equipped to grasp the full, cumulative and pervasive character of foreign cyber-operations targeting Canada. Thus, we set up an online and freely accessible directory of geopolitical cyber-incidents aimed at documenting publicly recorded incidents—their nature, their targets and, when possible, their initiators. The aim of the database was also to keep score of foreign cyber-activities targeting Canada so as to provide the public with a barometer of this phenomenon.
Three years later, as of today, our database has recorded 93 geopolitical cyber-incidents in Canada since 2010. Among those, 14 incidents took place in 2022 alone. In fact, we've observed that the frequency of such incidents is clearly increasing. As I mentioned, our work is based on only publicly recorded incidents, which means that many more incidents remain unreported to this day.
These 93 incidents include various types of malicious activity: economic espionage against Canadian businesses and universities; covert electronic surveillance of Canadian-based activists and non-governmental organizations; and intelligence gathering targeting Canadian government organizations, among others.
Our data further indicates that the overwhelming majority of these incidents originate from just four countries: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. While it is not always clear that the governments of these countries are responsible for each of these attacks, there is little doubt that these four states pose major cybersecurity challenges for Canada.
In 2021 and 2022, our team also published annual reports summarizing our key observations of the most recent cyberincidents. These reports were also intended to highlight certain current trends that we felt were critical to Canada's national security.
Our last assessment, published in 2022, focused on the following trends: the growing threat of ransomware cyber-attacks against Canadian entities, sometimes state-sponsored, which may disrupt critical infrastructure or serve as cover for clandestine intelligence collection; the increasingly aggressive targeting of Canadian-based activists, exiles and dissenters by foreign powers for purposes of espionage, intimidation and harassment; and the rise of the cyber-mercenaries industry, which is starting to target Canadian entities, most probably at the request of foreign powers.
Needless to say, these three trends do not represent the whole picture of cyber-threats that Canada is currently facing. The conflict in Ukraine or the constant economic espionage against Canadian research and development, for instance, should also get our close attention.
What I have tried to demonstrate with these facts, however, is that cybersecurity issues are not a futuristic, hypothetical, distant threat for Canada. Cyber-threats are already here with us. While they may appear discreet or intangible, they directly impact the lives of many people in Canada every day.
Hence, I think it is urgent to address these issues more vigorously and also to discuss them more publicly and more frankly. Today's hearing is an excellent opportunity to do so.
I look forward to answering your questions.