BQ Leader Blanchet bungled social media hacking incident, former cybersecurity official says

The Bloc Québécois missed an opportunity to own up to the mistakes of its leader, Yves-François Blanchet, and educate voters about best online practices after Blanchet’s X account was hacked nearly two weeks ago, said one of the province’s leading cybersecurity advisers.

Steve Waterhouse, former Quebec assistant minister of information security and cybersecurity, said the political party instead “downplayed” the whole event by not addressing an apparent cryptocurrency scam that ran on Blanchet’s account for 11 days .

“You have the integrity of the leader of the party that’s being drawn into the public attention, not for the right reasons. To then leave the event be as is and not make a big fuss about it, to me, says that he doesn’t understand the threat,” Waterhouse said.

The first suspicious post on Blanchet’s X account took place on July 11, promoting a cryptocurrency influencer and a supposed claim from the BQ leader that he had made tens of thousands of dollars thanks to her help. The tweet was promptly deleted.

Earlier this week, Blanchet’s X account raised more eyebrows after it showed an English-only post which accompanied pictures of him touring areas of Quebec, an unlikely occurrence for the Bloc leader who usually only posts in French.

Shortly after, two other posts related to the cryptocurrency scam reappeared on Blanchet’s X account, forcing the political party to admit their leader had been hacked.

“We invite the population to click on none of the links on publications related to cryptocurrency and any other link until notified to the contrary by the Bloc Québécois,” Blanchet’s spokeswoman, Joanie Riopel, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Riopel added that the party was counting on the prompt collaboration of X to resolve the situation as soon as possible.

On Friday, the Bloc announced that its leader’s X account was back and running and Blanchet posted a circumspect post: “With prudence and caution, I am making a publication on my personal page (which is now) restored and recovered,” he wrote on X Friday morning in French . “We will know in the coming hours and coming days if the account has been correctly restored.”

Waterhouse said the situation underlines that Blanchet was probably not using best online security practices. His account may have been hijacked either by a simple password hack, or one of the devices on which he was managing his account was compromised, he said.

Either way, Waterhouse said Blanchet should have owned up to his mistake.

“For me, it would have been a great opportunity for him to just say, ‘Listen, people, this happened to me… Please make sure you apply best practices by making sure you have a good password, to multi-factor authentication, and so on,” the expert said.

Waterhouse said it would have been an educational moment for Blanchet’s more than 54,000 followers on X, some of which may have been fooled by the cryptocurrency scam.

He also said the Bloc leader may attract some sympathy from voters by admitting he had made a mistake, as online fraud is becoming more and more sophisticated.

“But now, I believe that the results have been reversed, as people just look at him and say, ‘Really? This is what you have to say about this? This is what you do about a situation like that?’ It doesn’t give him points on being a leader you want to follow.”

Waterhouse said he sent the separatist party a link to the Government of Canada’s security considerations for using social media.

National Post calevesque@postmedia.com

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