> the timing of this seems to point to state sponsored hacking, no?
No.
The hack was obviously politically motivated, beyond that, nothing here points towards it being state sponsored. Non-state actors are equally motivated by the timing.
The idea that the Canadian government hacked GiveSendGo is also frankly ridiculous. Our government just isn't that lawless, and they could almost certainly get this data via legal means.
Both recent and historical evidence does not really support this claim. It is very very very easy to find many examples of governments breaking the law for their own benefit.
I don’t think it was the Canadian government either, but your logic does not seem good.
Both the words "our government" (i.e. the current canadian government), and "that" are doing work. Neither examples of random governments committing significant crimes, nor of the Canadian government committing less significantly corrupt crimes, contradict the premise.
There is ample evidence of the Canadian government breaking the law for their own benefit and there is ample evidence for these occurrences being “significant”.
And that’s not even taking into account that once trust is broken there are likely many more instances that aren’t known.
So by "significant" I'm excluding nonsense like this [1] where the government comes up with a creative (incorrect) interpretation of the law, and things like "a few rogue members of the government break the law" (e.g. [2]).
Neither of those would explain a government entity hacking this website to leak this data in an attempt to benefit the government.
I can't produce evidence that there isn't a history of actions like this, since my evidence really is just the lack of evidence. Thus I'd ask you to produce the "ample evidence" you claim exists.
One relevant example of the Canadian gov breaking the law and lying about it until they were caught was the 2007 Security and Prosperity Partnership protests in Montebello Quebec. In that case the government used agent provocateurs (provoking agents) who were dressed as protesters while initiating violence to paint the protesters in a bad light. The linked Wikipedia article lists several other examples. [0]
That said, I don't think the state was the responsible party for this attack.
> It is very very very easy to find many examples of governments breaking the law for their own benefit.
The current premier's father had feds planting explosive in people’s mailboxes [0] and tried to pin it on some political group he didn’t like back in the 70’s. Talk about a coincidence.
imo our government is probably lawless enough, but I doubt that it is competent enough to pull something off like that. The CSIS pays bad wages, their employees are mostly there for the cushy 9 to 5.
So incompetent they couldn't access an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket that was known to be insecure for some time? It sounds to me like GiveSendGo is simply incompetent with respect to security and some unskilled "hacker" took advantage of their incompetence.
No.
The hack was obviously politically motivated, beyond that, nothing here points towards it being state sponsored. Non-state actors are equally motivated by the timing.
The idea that the Canadian government hacked GiveSendGo is also frankly ridiculous. Our government just isn't that lawless, and they could almost certainly get this data via legal means.