IT companies in Bengaluru on high alert over WannaCry ransomware

The article by Kiran Parashar K M & Shruthi H M was published in the New Indian Express on May 17, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Sources said IT teams in many firms are working overtime to ensure such attacks do not harm their systems. Employees have been communicated to be aware of unsolicited emails and were asked to stay away from work at a few places where the security systems update was in progress.

A network engineer of a secondary source software firm, who provides security solutions, said, “We were asked to work on weekend and monitor the servers. The monitoring process is likely to continue. Some of the outsourcing companies have declared holiday as network engineers are flooded with work.”
“Recent developments have affected work at IT firms but there is no report of any company getting affected,” a techie said.

Wipro Ltd officials told Express: “Wipro has not seen any impact. However, we remain vigilant and have strengthened security controls at all layers to detect and mitigate any such threat.”

Companies providing financial technology are struggling to ensure that all ATMs are running on updated software. “We are in touch with the original equipment manufacturers for the patches that may be required to be rolled out on the ATMs running on Windows XP and Windows 7, to make them additionally secure,” said Radha Rama Dorai (Country Head - ATM & Allied Services), FIS, a financial technology provider.
“Fortunately ATMs in India have not been affected by WannaCry ransomware,” said Dorai.

Sudesh Shetty, Partner, Forensics, KPMG in India, said: “Banks need to apply the patch which Windows has released for outdated operating systems. Organisations need to make use of it.”

WannaCry under reported

The Indian Cyber Army sources said that there has been under reporting of such incidents as many individuals use pirated version of the Windows software. Also, people have no idea whom to report if they fall prey to WannaCry.