Kolkata: Ransomware “WannaCry” is suspected to have attacked some computers at the state power distribution company’s offices in West Midnapore, East Midnapore and South Dinajpur districts in Bengal.
Computers at four offices of the West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company at Belda, Dantan, Narayangarh and Keshiary in West Mindpore; Brajalalchowk, Sri Chaitanyapur at Haldia in East Midnapore and Balurghat in South Dinajpur district have been affected by the suspected ransomware attack.
State power minister Sovondeb Chattopadhyay admitted to the hacking of a number of computers of the state-run electricity distributor, but said that the day-to-day work of cash collection, receiving of compliants and so on have not been affected as all computers are connected to a central server. “I have directed our IT section to look into the matter and see whether we can overcome the situation,” he added.
The news of the cyber attack was first reported from West Mindapore, where eight to 10 computers involved in cash collection were hit.
“Out of 4,000 to 5,000 computers which are in our network, we have so far received information about ten such computers. We are trying to find out whether these are (related to) the same issue (ransomware),” Rajesh Pandey, chairman and managing director of WBSEDCL, said. He, however, added that the issue was a a localised one, and that the affected computers have been “sanitised”.
Within a few hours, there were reports of similar cyber attacks at a unit in Balurghat, South Dinajpur, and two units in Haldia. In all cases, the affected offices were advised to deactivate Internet connection to the affected computers. Employees at all the collection centres pointed out that the affected computers display a screen informing users that all files in the system are locked, and that they need to pay $300 in virtual currency, Bitcoins, to decrypt the files.
A cyber crime expert pointed out that once this ransomware affects a system, there is no way to save the data. There are also no instances of the files being unlocked even when payments as demanded were made. Cyber expert Saibal Chakraborty suggested that updating the windows operating system to the latest version can be a way to counter this attack. Bivash Chatterjee pointed out that users can keep backups of their data as a preventive measure.
