Canadian electric utility Nova Scotia Power revealed on Thursday that a recent cyberattack resulted in the theft of some customer information.
Nova Scotia Power and its parent company Emera reported earlier this week that on April 25 they detected unauthorized access to parts of their Canadian network and servers used for business applications.
Impacted servers were shut down and isolated in response to the hack, which resulted in the disruption of customer phone lines and online services. However, the power company said there was no disruption to physical operations.
“There remains no disruption to Nova Scotia Power’s generation, transmission and distribution facilities, and the incident has not impacted on our ability to safely and reliably serve customers in Nova Scotia,” the company said in a statement.
Nova Scotia Power provides electrical power to approximately 550,000 customers. Emera operates electric and natural gas utilities that serve 2.6 million customers in Canada, the US and the Caribbean.
Nova Scotia Power said on Thursday that the hackers managed to access and take “certain customer personal information”.
The investigation is ongoing and the company is working on determining how many individuals are impacted by the data breach and exactly what type of data has been compromised.
Affected customers will be notified, but in the meantime they have been urged to be on the lookout for suspicious communications that purport to come from Nova Scotia Power and request personal information.
It’s still unclear whether Nova Scotia Power has been targeted in a ransomware attack. No known ransomware group has taken credit for the incident and Nova Scotia Power has refused to share additional information when contacted by SecurityWeek.
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