CCES – If you’ve tried in recent days to send email to someone at the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, you’ll know that our email system is down, along with our Internet access.

We shut these systems down after the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre detected a cyber attack. The experts tell us that this is likely part of a broader campaign against the global anti-doping movement.

There have been similar attacks recently against the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).

Obviously, we’re concerned about this security breach. While we know our system was improperly accessed, at this point the experts can’t confirm that any confidential data was stolen from our system. We’ve engaged the expert services of a leading security firm to conduct a complete forensic analysis and to determine the extent of the breach.

We know this has been a source of frustration and inconvenience for many of the athletes who are part of the Canadian Anti-Doping Program, for national and multi-sport organizations, our business partners and our staff. We appreciate your patience and hope to have the situation rectified shortly. Interim measures are in place to maintain our core services.

As Canada’s national anti-doping agency, one of our most important responsibilities is the collection and protection of private information from high performance athletes across dozens of different sports. For the vast majority of these athletes, the personal information we have on file is limited to names, addresses and telephone numbers.

For some, CCES also maintains information about athlete whereabouts. And for a small minority of athletes, medical information is collected as part of an application for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE), where treatment of an athlete’s condition or illness requires medication that is included on the WADA’s Prohibited List.

In the case of the cyber attacks against WADA and USADA, the hackers released TUE information about some athletes.  Both organizations have vigorously defended those athletes, and that is exactly what the CCES would do under the same circumstances. The global anti-doping movement will not be dissuaded from its efforts to create a level playing field for clean athletes around the world.

We are keeping a very close eye on this situation and working closely with cyber security experts and law enforcement officials. We’ll be back up and running as soon as it is safe and secure to do so. Rest assured, we won’t take that step until we’ve taken whatever corrective measures may be necessary.

Should you have questions or concerns about this situation, please contact CCES by calling (613) 521-3340 or 1 800-672-7775. You can also find a series of Questions and Answers on our website at www.cces.ca.