Financial institutions on high alert after WannaCry attack

Following the WannaCry ransomware attack, RBI has asked financial institutions to follow the instructions issued by CERT-In even as a few of them have already initiated measures to counter the attack.

In an advisory, RBI asked the banks to follow the dos and don'ts issued by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to protect networks from the global ransomware attack.

Indian financial institutions are buckling under pressure as WannaCry encrypts the files on infected Windows system and spreads by exploiting vulnerabilities. The majority of Indian financial institutions are running their data centres in Mumbai and have their disaster management recovery servers located either in Bengaluru or Chennai.

RBI has asked the banks to improve their banking systems, including their ATM networks, with a Windows security update to enhance security and protect them from the malware attack that took place over the weekend.

While the bank’s officials — both private sector as well as public sector — were caught off guard regarding the advisory issued by the RBI, most of them declined to comment on the issue immediately, adding that they were still “taking stock of the situation”, when contacted by DH.
National Payment Commission of India (NPCI) has also issued an advisory to banks for patching the systems interfacing with NPCI, MD and CEO of NPCI, A P Hota said.

“We have issued an advisory to all the banks that systems interfacing with NPCI must be fully patched. RBI is also following up with them,” he said. Hota also said that the banks have not sent any formal compliance report still.

“We are fully prepared at our end,” he told DH adding that all the systems within NPCI have been patched. AGS Transact, a company that manages ATM network in the country, said the company is geared up to face the situation and none of their ATM operations were affected till now.

“We are testing software to counter the attack of the ransomware and it is progressing. We do hope that it will help us to overcome the situation,” a company official who didn’t want to be quoted said.

India faced a malware attack last year and 3.2 lakh debit cards were compromised. Data of the users who transacted from ATM machines of Hitachi were compromised during the months of May, June and July last year.  The White Label ATMs installed by Hitachi were impacted by the malware.