An Ontario jail has been forced to scale back its operations and take some of its servers offline after suffering an unidentified cyber breach at the beginning of the month.
Staff at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont., realized the jail had suffered a “breach related to its security systems” sometime on June 1.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Solicitor General’s office told Global News the correctional facility moved to its “continuity of operations plan.”
That involves scaling back how the jail operates but stops short of a full lockdown. The government said key day-to-day operations like attending court, showering and health care are all still being provided.
It’s unclear which parts of the jail’s security systems were hit by the outage or how exactly it has constrained the jail’s operations for the past two-plus weeks.
“The affected servers have been taken offline while work is underway to address the breach,” the solicitor general’s office said. “The Ontario Provincial Police have been engaged, and an investigation is underway.”
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They said inmate data was not included in the servers that were hit, but offered few other details.
“The Ministry continues to support the safe operations of CECC, while work is underway to get the system back up and running,” they added.
It’s not clear if the attack was a ransomware attack — which have been suffered by other public bodies like school boards or home care vendors —or another cyber issue. The government also could not say how long the scaled-back operations at the Lindsay jail would continue.
Ontario Liberal MPP Adil Shamji urged the government to make more information about the incident and potential threat public.
“The discovery that a provincial correctional facility has had its security system compromised and been forced to resort to a contingency operations plan is deeply alarming,” he said.
“The description of the incident raises major concerns that this may be more than a data breach and that prison security has been specifically targeted. If this includes surveillance systems and access control equipment like gates or locks, the public deserves to know immediately.”
Data from October 2025, previously obtained by Global News, suggests there are more than 1,400 inmates in the Central East Correctional Centre.
On Oct. 8, 2025, it was operating at 142 per cent, making it more overcrowded than the provincewide average of 131 per cent.
Shamji also pointed to a cyber-attack suffered by a vendor for Ontario Health atHome in early 2025, which the government didn’t disclose until months after it happened.
“As we live in an increasingly digital world, the threats facing our public institutions and critical infrastructure are growing more sophisticated and more frequent,” he added.
“Now is the time for Ontario to strengthen its cybersecurity capacity to protect sensitive information, defend essential services, and — most importantly — keep Ontarians safe.”
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