Dawsoncreek.ca fell victim to a denial of service attack Tuesday, the city's chief administrative officer confirmed, but the attack which temporarily crashed the municipal website appears to have been at most a minor annoyance.
An affiliate of the hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack in a message to Alaska Highway News, saying she sought "revenge" for James McIntyre, the man shot dead by police last month. The site was down sporadically Tuesday afternoon.
What the apparent hacker hoped to accomplish is unclear.
Chief Administrative Officer Jim Chute said there is no confidential information on the website.
"This is a city information website. We're not spending a lot of taxpayer money putting in robust protections," he said. "It's information sharing with our citizens, and it's intended to be open and public information."
He said the city's website contractor indicated the denial of service attack overwhelmed the city's servers with requests, leading it to crash. It was likely carried out using commercially available software.
At most the attack was an inconvenience.
"If you needed to know when public swim was, you can phone us, if you needed a building permit application, you could come into the office," Chute said. "If [the website] isn't available for a period of hours or days, the world is not going to come to an end."
reporter@dcdn.ca
