Inside Innovation: Bird Construction cyber-attack a warning to construction

The CBC reports that leading Canadian general contractor Bird Construction was recently the victim of a cyber-attack and ransom demand from a group known as Maze. The hacker group claims to have stolen 60 gigabytes of data. Bird Construction was founded in 1920. Today it is a publicly-traded company with offices from coast-to-coast in Canada and annual revenue over $1.3 billion (2018). In addition to serving a wide range of institutional and commercial clients, Bird has undertaken multiple contracts at both the federal and provincial level. The CBC reports that between 2006 and 2015 alone, Bird won some four dozen contracts with the Department of National Defence worth more than $406 million. In an email to the CBC, the company said, Bird Construction responded to a cyber incident that resulted in the encryption of company files.