He said it was a denial-of-service attack on the gc.ca domain server, which rendered many federal government websites inaccessible and left many government e-mail accounts unusable.
`There's been a cyberattack on the gc servers of the government of Canada. It's ongoing,` the Conservative minister told The Globe and Mail. He said he couldn't discuss the origin of the attack, saying he has not been briefed yet on that.
Over the last half hour, Industry, Employment, Natural Resources, Fisheries and Oceans, Justice, Labour, Foreign Affairs, Environment Canada and Transport Canada have been inaccessible.
Mr. Clement said Canadians who want to reach the government should use the telephone and call 1-800-O-Canada instead.
`There's only sporadic emails that are making their way through,` Mr. Clement said.
Mr. Clement said Shared Services Canada is working to restore email and computer service as soon as possible. He could not say whether other aspects of government information technology were also affected.
The websites appear to be the victim of what are called denial-of-service attacks. One variant of these attacks is where hackers flood a website with outside requests to communicate with the website, leaving it unable to deal with legitimate web traffic.
Within several hours, the attacks had subsided and government website and emails were functioning normally once again.
A video posted on Youtube purportedly from the hacktivists known as Anonymous said the group takes responsibility for the attack on Canadian government computers.
In the video, the voice of someone claiming to be with Anonymous said the attack was in response to the Canadian government's passage of Bill C-51, the controversial anti-terror legislation that has been heavily criticized for granting too much power to security and intelligence agencies.
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