The IT ministry has reached out to key stakeholders like RBI, National Payments Corporation of India, NIC and UIDAI (Aadhaar) to advise them to protect their systems against ‘Wanna Cry’ ransomware to ensure that the digital payments ecosystem in the country is protected.
Over the weekend, the ransomware hit systems in over 100 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history. It infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer.
The Reserve Bank of India has advised all banks to operate their Automated teller machines(ATMs) only after updating software systems to avoid being infected by WannaCry ransomware.
ATMs are highly vulnerable to such malware attacks as they presently run on old version of Windows operating system thus making a software update a necessary exercise.
However, ATM operators have denied that there was any threat to customer information and that could lead to theft of money from ATMs. They say that the principal motive of these ransomware was only to lock important information in networks and stop customer access to them.
If you wonder who is behind these attacks, Well !! Nobody knows. Europol's Jan Op Gen Oorth said: "A bit early to say... but we are working on a decrypting tool".
Associated Press quoted Tim Wellsmore, of US security firm FireEye, as saying: "We expect this is a small operation... They just happened to hit the mother lode."
Russian President Vladimir Putin said: "Russia has absolutely nothing to do with it."
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