Ontario family support charity learns of ransomware incident after threat actors send emails targeting clients

On Thursday 2^nd of December 2021, Social Enterprise for Canada (SEC), a Southern Ontario charity that offers family services announced they had learned they has been a target of a ransomware attack on Tuesday, 23^rd of November 2021 which resulted in some of the servers supporting their email and IT systems being affected. They were alerted to the incident when it was discovered that the threat actors has emailed some of their clients notifying them of the attack and threatening to release personal information of the clients unless they clicked on a link in the email. Social Enterprise for Canada has released a press release advising anyone who may have received an email from them in the last 48 hours not to open, click links or respond to the email.

Social Enterprise for Canada took immediate action when alerted to the incident which involved them suspending all affected systems, notifying York Regional Police and working with Check Point in activating a contingency plan to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. Social Enterprise for Canada are working on restoring their systems as soon as possible. Patricia Cousins made it clear that Social Enterprise for Canada is not currently aware of any evidence that any client data has been compromised or misused because of the incident.

“We haven’t found any data was copied, which we’re quite relieved about. We’ve asked Check Point to do the best search they can, but on the first scan it looks very positive that we didn’t have a data loss. We did, however, have our email compromised.” – SEC chief executive Patricia Cousins.