India largely escapes WannaCry attack

Indian businesses, organisations and financial institutions largely escaped the impact of WannaCry malware attack, though India was the third most affected after Russia and Ukraine.

There were fears of a big cyberattack unfolding when offices opened on Monday after the weekend and the government agencies, Reserve Bank of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India were on a vigil against the virus which has wrecked havoc across 150 countries.

"The 7.8 million of the user base, 97% of which are India-based, remain unaffected by the global cyber threat as the company came out with solutions in time," said an official at Quick Heal Technologies, a cybersecurity firm.

According to Kaspersky Labs, India is the third-most impacted country after Russia and Ukraine.

"We have confirmed additional infections in several additional countries (apart from the UK), including Russia, Ukraine, and India," it said in a report.

The malware targets the outdated or legacy computer systems that run on old versions of Microsoft operating systems (OS).

Apart from technological triggers, technology users are the second real targets.

"Human beings are the weakest link for they can click on malicious files increasing their data's exposure to the globally active ransomware virus," Altaf Halde, managing director-South Asia, Kaspersky Lab, told DNA Money.

Kaspersky has recorded more than 45,000 attacks of the WannaCry ransomware in 74 countries around the world, mostly in Russia.

"It's important to note that our visibility may be limited and incomplete and the range of targets and victims is likely much, much higher," the company said in a statement.

Aruna Sundararajan, Union electronics and information technology, told Reuters the government was constantly monitoring the situation and that a few stand-alone computers of a police department were "back in action" after being infected over the weekend.

The 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, according to the agency report.

Pankit Desai, co-founder and chief executive officer at cyber security start-up Sequretek, said India's unorganised sector may have escaped dire consequences so far, but the attack is ongoing.

"It is too early to gauge the actual impact," he said, adding, it will be 'fairly widespread'.

According to Desai, real targets are the sectors that have the ability to pay, banking and government being the most obvious of all.

"Other sectors include jewellery, pharma, IT and retail. However, large enterprises will majorly be immune to this attack as they undergo periodic audits, which forces them to update their OS regularly," he said.

On Sunday, country's cyber security agency Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had issued a red-coloured 'critical alert' to combat hacking, phishing and to fortify security-related defences of the Indian Internet domain.