JOIN USIndia sees no threat from ransomware, says IT Minister
The Centre on Monday said there was no serious impact due to ransomware ‘WannaCry’ in the country from an unprecedented global cyber attack, except for a few isolated incidents in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.
As a precaution, the government has directed all its institutions and state governments to follow the cyber security alert issued by CERT-In, cyber security unit of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said here.
National Informatics Centre, which builds and manages almost all government websites, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a premier research institute that has built supercomputers, have actively installed patches to immunise their Windows systems and functioning normally, said the minister.
The IT department will set up a separate unit in the CERT-In to co-ordinate with various agencies including international level to prevent any such incidents in future, and the centre will start functioning next month, the minister added.
India is on high alert, monitoring critical networks across sectors including banking, telecom, power and aviation to ensure that systems are protected in the wake of global cyber attack by ransomware ‘WannaCry.’ The central transmission utility Power Grid said it has put sufficient firewalls to deal with the cyber attack and consumers need not fear sudden outages on that account.
Separately, CERT-In earlier in the day said it has not received any formal report of cyber attack on India’s vital networks. In a related development, Capital markets regulator Sebi and top stock exchanges have beefed up their cyber security systems to ward off any threat from the ransomware.
In India, there were reports that some systems of Andhra Pradesh Police were affected on Saturday, although CERT-In has said that the computers were isolated and not on a network.
There were also reports that some computers in the West Bengal Electricity Board, and Maharashtra police were hit by cyber attack.