India-linked hacktivist DDoS attacks on Canadian government websites

In late September 2023, websites belonging to the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Parliament were knocked offline by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks claimed by an India-aligned hacktivist group calling itself Indian Cyber Force. The group, which has no confirmed formal links to the Indian government, framed the campaign as retaliation for a deepening diplomatic rift between Ottawa and New Delhi.

The tensions followed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau telling Parliament on 18 September 2023 that Canada had credible allegations of Indian government involvement in the June 2023 killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. India rejected the accusation. According to The Globe and Mail, the Canadian Armed Forces site (forces.ca) became unavailable to most mobile users around midday on 27 September and was restored within roughly two hours, while desktop access remained possible.

Daniel Le Bouthillier of the Department of National Defence said the affected site was separate and isolated, with no indication of broader impacts to military systems. Reporting also described disruption to pages of the House of Commons and Senate websites. The Communications Security Establishment, Canada's signals intelligence agency, had warned administrators days earlier that geopolitical events typically drive an uptick in such attacks.

This was nuisance-level hacktivist disruption, not a state-directed cyber operation. DDoS attacks flood a site with traffic to make it briefly unreachable; they do not breach systems or expose data, and Canadian officials reported no compromise of sensitive information. Attribution rests on the group's own Telegram claims. While Indian Cyber Force is India-aligned and acted amid the Nijjar dispute, there is no confirmed evidence linking it to the Indian state. The episode illustrates how diplomatic flashpoints reliably trigger opportunistic hacktivism rather than sophisticated intrusion.