There are many reports which claim that Wanna Cry Ransomware attack has affected India to a great extent; there was also news about ATMs being shut down in India so that a cyber attack can be prevented.
Sources from the MHA i.e. Ministry of Home Affairs stated that ATMs have been shut down in India due to virus concerns; the situation is being investigated by the MHA.
In the meantime, it was reported that RBI had issued an advisory to the banks to shut down their ATMs; however, RBI has denied these rumors and said that it has not asked the banks to shut down ATM kiosks, but has just asked to get a software update so that the systems remain safe.
A spokesperson of RBI said, “RBI has not given any direction or issued any advisory to banks to shut down their ATMs. Wrong information is floating around that RBI has instructed banks to shut down ATMs.”
Talking about this, experts say,
“80% of ATMs in India operates on Windows XP, on top of that there is a firmware that runs it. This firmaware uses a method called “whitelisting of services” to ensure that only a certain number of activities can be performed through an ATM, such as, withdrawing money, checking account balance etc. Other activities are blacklisted preventing a ransomware to attack and cripple it.”
In India, there are around 2.2 lakh ATMs and out of them, majority of them are on Windows XP. ATMs are highly vulnerable to such attacks.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, the IT minister has stated, “Kerala and Andhra Pradesh have been affected partly. We are keeping a close eye on the situation and strengthening our cyber system”. In 2 villages of Kerala, it was seen that USD 300 in virtual currency was demanded for unlocking the hacked files.
As of now CERT-In has proposed a list of precautions in order to protect networks from this ransomware. Even Microsoft has come up with a security patch to take care of this attack.