Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold

Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold is a non‑profit organization headquartered in Canada.
The organization operates under the name Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold, reflecting its association with the cities of St. Catharines and Thorold.
It maintains client data that is stored in cloud storage systems.
The organization's computer systems are essential to its day‑to‑day operations.
To protect against data loss, the organization keeps regular backups of its information.

On June 28, 2017, the organization suffered a ransomware attack that encrypted its computer systems and displayed a demand for a $3,000 Bitcoin payment to restore access.
Leadership chose not to pay the ransom and instead contracted external technical support to address the infection.
The affected machines were wiped and the systems were reconstructed using data from the most recent backups.
While the encryption made devices unusable for over a week, the client data stored in the cloud remained secure and was not accessed by the attackers.
Full functionality was restored after approximately seven days of recovery effort.
Any data created after the last backup cycle was permanently lost as a result of the encryption.
The event underscored existing weaknesses in the organization's cybersecurity posture despite the successful recovery of operations and data.