Geopolitical Cyber Incidents in Canada : 2025 Assessment
Par Danny Gagné, Simon Hogue, Marie Lamensch, Laurence Michalski, Alexis Rapin, Fanny Tan, Charlotte Vincent et Frédérick Gagnon
Un rapport de l'Observatoire des conflits multidimensionnels de la Chaire Raoul-Dandurand | UQAM
As the year 2025 gets underway, the North American news cycle is becoming increasingly politically charged, and Canada’s digital space is increasingly marked by the debates that governments and public opinion engage in on a daily basis. Last February, for example, we learned that Ottawa had ordered the Communications Security Establishment — Canada’s main cybersecurity agency — to deploy for the first time its cyber capabilities against transnational drug traffickers. Clearly reacting to pressure from the Trump administration on border security, Canadian authorities now seem to want to use their cybersurveillance tools (and potentially their cyber attacks capabilities) to thwart fentanyl trafficking, one of the current areas of tension with our American neighbor. This is further proof, if any were needed, that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk about politics without talking about the digital in Canada.
This increasingly close link is the focus of our latest report on geopolitical cyber incidents in Canada, the fifth publication of its kind produced by the Raoul Dandurand Chair’s Center on Multidimensional Conflicts. Between cyberespionage campaigns and online influence operations, Canada remains year after year a significant target of the cyberconflictuality shaking the global digital space. As such, the analysis carried out in this report (without claiming to be exhaustive) has identified 11 geopolitical cyber incidents in Canada in 2024. In all, the Raoul Dandurand Chair’s Directory of Canadian cyber incidents, from which the data in this report is derived, currently lists 125 geopolitical cyber incidents affecting Canada since 2010. However, this data comes solely from open sources, and therefore reflects only a fraction of the malicious digital activity taking place in the country.
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