Russia’s move to invade Ukraine is calling into question the economic and cyber safety of Canadians moving forward.
Residents of the GTA are seeing gas prices reach an all-time high at $1.59, but that’s only just the beginning.
Dan McTeague, petroleum analysis and president of Canadians for Affordable Energy says we could see prices at the pumps jump to $1.75. Prices of propane and other gases are also expected to rise.
“We have Mr. Putin using this opportunity to attack Ukraine with full knowledge that we need oil,” he said.
Part of why Canada was left so vulnerable, McTeague said, was due to the push to become more eco-friendly.
“Price inflation is going to be a major problem for governments and for consumers,” McTeague said.
The invasion of Ukraine is, as of Thursday, less than 24-hours-old, so Canadians will need to wait before any gas price increases become noticeable.
While the physical cost of travel will begin to climb, Canadians may also face another threat, this time hitting them online.
Before the Russian invasion began, Ukraine faced a series of cyber outages in a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, which affected online activity.
DDoS attacks overload online servers with fake internet traffic, causing the servers to either slow down or crash and destabilize online access.
N. Asokan, executive director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at the University of Waterloo, said data-wiping malware attacks might also be used.
“These are like ransomware attacks except that they are worse – because the attacker’s goal is to permanently delete the victims’ data. There are already reports of such attacks against Ukraine,” Asokan said.
A bulletin post from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security indicates that an online threat was detected in the form of Russian-backed attacks to target Canadian critical infrastructure networks.
“There is not much ordinary users can do to protect themselves since they are not directly attacked – they suffer indirectly because they lose access to digital services that they rely on,” N. Asokan told Humber News.
“People can take the standard precautions recommended for guarding against ransomware, such as not opening suspicious links in emails, but none of these are convenient or foolproof but people, especially those working for potential target organizations, would be well advised to exercise particular care given the current situation,” he said.
He adds organizations and enterprises cannot do much against sophisticated DDoS attackers that have access to nation-state level resources.