Recent victims have included large corporations such as retailer London Drugs, as well as the City of Hamilton, Ont., and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Toronto-based lawyer Eric Charleston says it’s not so simple, and he’s seen cases where a ban would have meant “a punishment of the victims.” “The fact that all these transactions are recorded on the blockchain the bread crumbs are there on where this money is going,” he said. Targeted companies can face class-action lawsuits over data breaches – last month, victims of a 2019 breach at LifeLabs Inc. started receiving payments of $7.86 each. That doesn’t sound like much, but the total settlement amounted to $9.8-million.
Callow said the good news for individual employees is that typically, nothing further happens with their stolen data. “It just sits there on the dark web,” he said. Certain foreign states were conducting “wide-ranging and long-term campaigns” to compromise Canadian government and private-sector computer systems, the statement said, singling out China, Russia, Iran and North Korea., finding the federal government lacked the capacity or tools to effectively combat increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
Ontario’s proposed legislationwas aimed at enhancing cybersecurity for public-sector institutions governed by existing privacy and freedom of information laws.