Sources say: Ontario Progressive Conservative Party database hacked

Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s internal database has been hacked, the sources say.The database contains the names, phone numbers and other personal information of over a million eligible voters in the province, as well as party supporters, donors and campaign volunteers.

The Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) has been used in election campaigns over the past 15 years. The CIMS was breached before Christmas using a ransomware virus, but the attack was not the first on the system.

The PC Party initially declined a request for comment on the breach, but later issued a statement.

"In early November, a system vulnerability within the Party's network was discovered and used to access and encrypt four servers. As per the ransomware note, the attack was non-specific to the PCPO,” the statement read.

“The vendor responsible for managing, monitoring, and maintaining the Party's servers immediately quarantined the affected servers and began restoring pre-attack server backups within the same day. Their logs indicated that no data was stolen from the Party.”

The statement added that “additional security measures were immediately implemented” to prevent the same thing from happening again.