Wannacry hits India hard; over 40,000 computers affected

Global malware Wannacry has hit India hard, infecting more than 40,000 computers and making it the third worst hit nation.

However, no major corporate or bank has reported any disruption to their activities. This has also led to speculations about these entities deliberately trying to hide the impacts of the attack.

"There is a lack of transparency in India, in-spite of a mandatory requirement for banks and listed companies to disclose cyber-attack, however, very few banks and companies do that," Tushar Ajinkya, Partner, DSK Legal, told ET. "We have seen earlier that black hats would mainly attack and deface Indian websites but now the objective is mainly money."

As reported earlier, there were fears that Indian banks’ ATMs would be worst hit because of old systems. However, it was these outdated ATM systems that were the least impacted.

"In our research we found that a large percentage of attacks globally by WannaCry happened in India and the country was third on the total number of attacks," said Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab, South Asia.

"Most of the Indian organisations are still vulnerable to the attacks since the sophistication of these cyber threats is going up and many of Indian organisations including private and public sector still use outdated operating systems which make it easy for the cyber attackers to compromise the systems."

(Image source Heise)