Through its website and daily newsletters, The Peak (a ZoomerMedia property) offers Canadians the news they need to understand business, tech, and other must-know stories.
In this dispatch, The Peak looks at how car thieves are changing their tactics to evade law enforcement, the uptick in cybersecurity attacks on Canadian businesses and a brewing fight over competition policy focussing on two of Canada’s most popular national parks.
Car Thieves Have a New Gameplan
More thieves in Canada are erasing the “fingerprints” of stolen cars to slip under the radar of law enforcement.
Driving the news: Canada’s Transport Minister has sent letters to provinces and territories warning that a growing number of car thieves are evading police by ‘re-vinning’ stolen vehicles — the illegal process of stripping and changing a car’s registration.
- While auto thefts in Canada were down 17 per cent in the first half of this year, law enforcement across the country have seen a major spike in vehicle identification numbers (VIN) being changed on stolen cars.
Catch-up: Law enforcement’s focus has mostly been on keeping stolen vehicles from leaving Canada, but as police crackdown on ports, a growing number of stolen cars are now being kept in the country, re-vinned, and sold back to unsuspecting Canadian customers.
- If a re-vinned vehicle is discovered, the car is usually seized and returned to the original owner without any compensation for the swindled buyer.
Why it matters: Even with auto thefts down, a car is still stolen in Canada every five minutes. Widespread re-vinning could make it even harder to catch thieves and put used-car buyers at risk of losing their ride. —Lucas Arender
The Cost of a Breach Has Never Been Higher
Despite near-constant warnings, Canadian companies are getting hit harder than ever by cybersecurity incidents.
Driving the news: StatsCan released new data showing that one in six Canadian businesses were impacted by a cybersecurity incident in 2023. While that is down very slightly from 2021, the amount those companies spent on recovery doubled to $1.2 billion.
- The uptick is likely due to the fact that a greater portion of cyber incidents are now made up of identity theft, fraud, and ransomware, which can have expensive consequences.
- Only 12 per cent of companies that were hit with ransomware paid up. Among those, the vast majority paid less than $10,000, but 4 per cent paid over $500,000.
Zoom in: Bigger companies are a bigger prize for cybercriminals, but small businesses are feeling the effects, too:
- A study by IT firm Kyndryl and Amazon Web Services found that 60 per cent of large Canadian companies experienced a cyber incident in the last 12 months, with 74 per cent of those getting hit four or more times.
- Okta found roughly 75 per cent of small- to medium-sized businesses use only basic antivirus software that doesn’t address where most cybercrime comes from — but 16 per cent pay over $200,000 to update their systems after an attack.
- The effects aren’t just monetary: Roughly one-third of SMB owners who experienced a cyberattack reported it having an impact on their mental health.
Why it’s happening: Nearly three-quarters of cyber incidents are caused by human error, like an employee responding to a phishing email with private info, or failing to change a compromised password.
- AI has a role to play in helping cybercriminals automate tasks. That not only means, for example, writing and sending out more phishing emails, but tracking down info that makes a fake email from your boss or IT department more believable.
Why it matters: Despite a rash of high-profile incidents in recent years putting businesses on guard about cybersecurity, the data shows that they are still getting caught — and paying the price. —Josh Kolm
Competition Fight Erupts in National Parks
Canada’s national parks are world-renowned for their natural beauty and majestic vistas, but now they’ve also become the site of something far less serene: a brewing fight over competition policy.
What happened: Canada’s Competition Bureau has launched an inquiry into U.S.-based VIAD’s growing control of tourist attractions in Banff and Jasper national parks.
- The probe follows the company’s recent lease acquisition of the Jasper SkyTram, a deal that Parks Canada approved last month.
Why it’s happening: VIAD has established a dominant position in the region’s sightseeing market, controlling six of nine paid attractions in Banff and Jasper national parks, the local Brewster Express bus line, and 10 hotels in the parks.
- Rivals claim that gives VIAD control of more than 90 per cent of the sightseeing market for the parks and the power to push competitors out of business through predatory pricing and ticket bundling.
Why it matters: The investigation is an early test of changes to Canada’s Competition Act made this summer that deem mergers resulting in one company gaining more than 30 per cent market share presumptively anticompetitive.
Zoom out: If the Competition Bureau intervenes against VIAD, it could set a precedent for more aggressive enforcement of competition rules in other areas of the economy. —Taylor Scollon
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