How is Canada's intelligence community responding to the military action in Iran?

0:00Welcome back to the weekend morning show. I'm Jay for our in for Joanne Vrakis. Joanne will be back next week. The conflict in Iran is raising questions that go well beyond the Middle East, including right here in Canada. How is our intelligence community responding and just how exposed are we? Cybersecurity expert Steve Waterhouse joins us now. Steve, welcome. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Good morning, Jay. So we heard from PM Karni and the Canadian Armed Forces. He said that they had no role in the strikes received no advance notice, but he didn't rule out future involvement. We also heard from General Jenny Kevin of the Canadian Armed Forces saying that there may be operations carried out in support of golf allies if needed. What is most likely happening right now from an intelligence operation standpoint behind the scenes? Well, first of all, from the the allies perspective, yes, a few were warned in advance about this operation.

1:00And it's a new way of doing things from our southern neighbors, but now that everybody has to get to know what's going on and how the tempo is. Definitely the interest of Canada, it is to come and help our fellow citizens that are maybe a jeopardy somewhere. And the Canadian Forces traditionally will have assets in play in these countries to make sure that if needs come, they will be able to assist Canadian citizens to get out and get into safe areas and maybe stage them to bring them back into the country. Would there be any drills going on behind the scenes at this point? I haven't heard anything from my colleagues that are still in service, which would be to prepare themselves. One thing that is mostly probable is that the Joint Task Force, two personnel probably and the C-SOR, those operational units, probably they are having advanced warnings stating that they have to be prepared to go in some country or some area and assist it, like I said, prepared to take control of an evacuation let's say.

2:07What about from a cyber perspective, Canada's intelligence agencies, are they warning of Iranian cyber attacks? What are the most likely targets? How serious is this threat right now? Well, definitely a serious threat to our way of life because the I-I-R-G-C, sorry, have been on our scope as a threatening organization since the last threat risk assessment of October 2024. So that said, since the initial attacks, the warnings have been out from the Canadian government stating that critically for structure operators, then critically for structures are your typical daily water supply, electricity, telecommunications, production, agriculture, etc. There are 10 pillars like that in Canada, and warning these operators to be on the lookout from suspicious activities. And the type of cyber operation they'll be able to mount, it is really to create a denial of service attack, which are especially overwhelming in a website of some sort.

3:14Let's say the departure and arrival information system in the airport in Montreal will be one kind of target they could take on like that, and there won't be just the I-I-R-G-C people doing that. And on 30 a pseudonym, muddy water, they're known in the industry as such, but they have proxies and the industry right now is tracking about 72 proxies that are working with the Iranians and creating havoc in the Middle East. But we anticipate, and I say we from the subversive security professionals that they will come into all the countries that are supporting the American initiative. But by such, creating these kind of havocs, certainly creating online harassment towards political, military personnel, but also towards a diaspora. Yeah, you would assume that Canada would not be immune even though Iran is concentrated on the US and Israel for the time being. Canada did support the strikes, Prime Minister Marconi was very clear on that at the beginning of the week anyway.

4:17And then, so I mean, there's a possibility of cells that intelligence community could be tracking at this point. Oh, definitely because if the regime is currently the, let's say the current administration of the I-I-G-C is still in control of the country as we see it from the outside. And from what we can read on various social media, it seems like they're reorganizing, but they haven't been taken down properly, let's say. And this is another aspect also that we have to be mindful of since we're not having, we're not directly involved on the ground. There's a lot of disinformation right now that is running around. We've seen so many videos, pictures of let's people just commenting saying, hey, this is the attack that happened, this is the explosion that happened that took out such and such target whatsoever. And they were false, they were artificially created by until archivist intelligence or they were videos and pictures from different situations that occurred the years before.

5:20So putting it in kind of a perspective and a realistic perspective for the layman should ordinary Canadians be concerned right now? Should they have a little bit more vigilance? What should they understand about their exposure here? There are all sorts of cyber criminal gains that will want to get access to everyone's information system to help them out in committing their attacks of denial of service. Again, I insist on saying, and the denial service is taking over a system and at that moment, we're going to, the perpetrators will so say that they'd access the compromise system and make it generate random demands on a target system, which will take the system down. So if you're exposed by a system, again, and I say an information system, which would be a typical smartphone, tablet, laptop, anything that has an IP address basically can become a slave or a zombie. It's calling the field and will be part of these kind of operations.

6:20I didn't want to say those, Jay, just the last thing. I didn't want to say that we don't have police people don't panic about what you see on TV, what's read online. And this is part of the disinformation that everybody's going to be overwhelmed by a lot of what they see on the screen, what they read on their phones and all. I see a lot of people are just going crazy with that. I know if you spoke about that earlier, but definitely this will become a social anxiety that will be amplified by the temple that will augment as the American administration spoke about. So this will make people edgy and when they're going to read something online, they're going to think it's real. That's why I was talking about the disinformation campaign that will be ongoing. That's great advice. If we don't want to sound too alarmist either, we want to have a measured response and not hit the panic button right away. Great insight. Great advice as usual, Steve. I thank you so much for giving us the time this morning to explain what's going on when it comes to cyber security and intelligence. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Have a nice day. You too. That Steve Waterhouse cyber security expert introducing Brian Adams radio.

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