A publishing firm in India’s national capital, New Delhi has fallen victim to the WannaCry ransomware, that crippled 48,000 computer systems in India and hundreds of thousands of computers across 150 countries back in May. The ransomware attack in May was listed as one of the world's largest cyber attacks in history and India was the third-most affected nation.
The WannaCry malware attack exploits potential vulnerabilities of computer systems as hackers encrypt all files and demand ransom in exchange for unlocking them. Last year, a ransomware attack was used to target the Mumbai police system, and several files were encrypted by hackers.
After the WannaCry ransomware cyber attack spread like wildfire and paralysed computer systems, isolated incidents were reported from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala and West Bengal. This is the first case of the WannaCry ransomware attack in Delhi.
Rachna Sagar Private Limited in Daryaganj which publishes books for students of CBSE and ICSE boards, registered a complaint at Daryaganj police station on August 9 after it found that the employees are unable to log in to their accounts in any of the 200 computers in the office, and are only able to use the “demo” account.
When the IT staff at the firm tried to diagnose the problem, they found that they had been at the receiving end of a ransomware attack.
According to a report in The Indian Express, the hackers had posted a message demanding a ransom between USD 800 to USD 1,000 in bitcoins.
Reportedly, the publishing firm uses an accounting software ‘Busy’ where employees are required to log in for accounting purposes.
The police are investigating the matter. However, data is yet to be recovered from the affected systems.
Sources claim that the hackers have locked the firm out of its own data from April. Employees now fear using net banking facilities which they speculate has been compromised by the hackers.
