NB Liquor says an internal business directory was accessed during a recent cyber incident that forced the corporation to shut down its systems.
Lori Stickles, CEO of the Crown corporation, said Wednesday that an in-depth forensic investigation into the Jan. 7 incident has concluded.
“To be absolutely clear, there was no personal or financial information accessed, nor was there any malware or ransomware installed in our systems,” Stickles said in a statement.
Stickles said business email addresses and phone numbers of internal employees and some external business partners, such as vendors or agents, were accessed during the incident, but added this information is largely publicly available.
The Crown corporation has notified the Office of the Ombud of New Brunswick and also informed the affected partners “out of an abundance of caution” so they could be extra vigilant to phishing attempts to their business emails.
“We take our responsibility as a Crown Corporation seriously; as such, we followed our internal process for potential information breach to ensure no personal information was compromised,” said Stickles.
NB Liquor shut down all of its systems “as a preventative measure” after the corporation’s security controls detected “some anomalies” in their system on Jan. 7.
As a result, all of its corporate stores were forced to close for much of the day on Jan. 8 and 9, although agency stores and grocery stores were not impacted.
NB Liquor and Cannabis NB were also cash-only for more than a week but began accepting debit and credit transactions again over the weekend.
