A ransomware attack on a third-party service provider compromised shipment information for 44 of Canada Post’s big business clients, the company said.
Canada Post is the country’s major postal service provider, serving 16.5 million residential and corporate addresses in Canada.
It announced yesterday that a third-party provider, Commport Communications, was the victim of a ransomware incident in which threat actors gained access to data stored on their servers.
Shipping manifest data for big parcel company clients, including sender and recipient contact information, names, and postal addresses, is among the data that has been compromised.
The company says there is no evidence that any financial information was compromised.
A total of 44 business customers and 950,000 receiving consumers were impacted by the hack.
“After a detailed forensic investigation, there is no evidence that any financial information was breached. In all, the impacted shipping manifests for the 44 commercial customers contained information relating to just over 950 thousand receiving customers,” Canada Post said.
The information was from July 2016 to March 2019. The vast majority (97%) included the receiving customer’s name and address. The remaining 3% was an email address and/or phone number.
Lorenz has claimed responsibility for the breach. The ransomware organization said on their data leak site in December 2020 that they had hacked Commport Communications during a ransomware attack.
The ransomware group has since leaked 35.3 GB of data that was allegedly stolen during the attack. Data from Commport Communications has been leaked on a ransomware website.
While Canada Post claims that at the time of the assault, Commport did not believe any of their data had been accessed, it appears that this was not the case based on the released data.
Canada Post claims to have involved external cybersecurity experts and has notified the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
