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.
It was too early to say who was behind the onslaught, which struck 100,000 organizations, and what their motivation was, aside from the obvious demand for money. That's why it's called ransomware.
Smith also noted that Microsoft released a patch almost two months prior for the very vulnerability the WannaCrypt ransomware exploited, but a failure to install the patch left hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of computers around the world vulnerable.
The software tools to create the attack were revealed in April among a trove of NSA spy tools that were either leaked or stolen. That tool was stolen and made available by the Shadow Brokers, a hacking group that has released several caches of files from the government agency. Although Microsoft officially dropped support for Windows XP in 2014, it issued a security update two months ago that would have prevented WannaCry from spreading - if companies had bothered to install it. Moreover, up-dating system software and security programs can be more complex and costly for such entities given their sheer size, thus, exposing them to significant attacks based upon the vulnerability of their systems.
Consumers are also at risk.
"It happens that this attack is targeting the Windows computers".
The attack has been found in 150 countries, affecting 200,000 computers, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency. Health care providers in Britain's NHS, for example, were forced to turn ambulances away and cancel or delay cancer treatments for patients over the weekend, though officials say 80 percent of the NHS's systems were unaffected and that the disruption is easing.
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Businesses could face legal claims if they failed to deliver services because of the attack, said Edward McAndrew, a data privacy lawyer at Ballard Spahr. More importantly, ensure that you've installed all the relevant security patches for your version of Windows. It affects the computers which have not updated it yet.
Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) has come out with a list of dos and dont's and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack.
The initial attack, known as "WannaCry", paralyzed computers running factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems in scores of countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Spain, India and Japan, among others. But unlike NHS trusts and hospitals in England and Scotland which suffered significantly at the hands of the ransomware attack late last week, NHS Wales wasn't affected by the ransomware attack at all, a feat largely attributed to the fact the health system recently updated its entire network.
For one thing, the attackers or copycat attackers may have developed new versions of the worm, although a British-based security researcher who thwarted an earlier version of the worm told Reuters most of these reports had been proven false.
It's not just about updating software, the attacks also stress on the growing need of ethical hackers. Entities such as multinational corporations, hospitals, or energy companies are attractive targets for ransomware due to the ability to infect multiple computers on a single network and encrypt valuable data.
Businesses have been scrambling since Friday evening when news spread that a ransomware attack named WannaCry is compromising organizations at an alarming rate.
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