A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Tuesday, May 16, 2017
West Bengal state power company's computers hit by ransomware attack
A projection of cyber code on a hooded man is pictured in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration
The global ransomware attack has affected several computers of a state
power distribution company in West Bengal but the central government
computer system has largely escaped, officials said on Monday.
State agencies that manage government websites and build supercomputers
have installed security patches issued by Microsoft Corp.
Federal Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters that there was no
serious impact on India, with only isolated incidents in parts of Kerala
and Andhra Pradesh states, and the government was monitoring the
situation.
However, West Bengal Power Minister Sovandev Chattopadhyay told Reuters
that several billing centres of the state's Electricity Distribution
Company Ltd (WBSEDCL) had been infected by the ransomware worm.
"The full extent and magnitude of the problem will be realised by
tomorrow," he said, the situation will be very serious if household
electricity consumption data from the central server of the utility
could not be retrieved beforehand.
A power department official who did not want to be named said billing
for around 800,000 households was affected when the ransomware blocked
access to files in the computers.
A senior official at the Federal Ministry of Electronics and Information
Technology said its Computer Emergency Response Team was gathering all
possible information about the ransomware.
The cyber attack, which shut car factories, hospitals, shops and schools
over the weekend, has proved less severe than anticipated in Asia, but
industry professionals have flagged potential risks in the future.
Aruna Sundararajan, secretary of India's Ministry of Electronics and
Information Technology, told Reuters the government was constantly
monitoring the situation and that a few stand-alone computers at a
police department were "back in action" after being infected over the
weekend.
It was not immediately clear what the police department did to secure its systems.
India's 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,
Sundararajan said.
Her ministry has also asked chief information security officers of all
organisations run by provincial governments to follow guidelines issued
by New Delhi to tackle the issue.
(Reporting by Krishna N. Das and Manoj Kumar in New Delhi, Subrata Nagchoudhury in Kolkata; Editing by Mark Heinrich)