Thiruvananthapuram: About 40 computers at the Thiruvananthapuram rural district police chief's office were hit by a virus on Wednesday evening. This comes close on the heels of the state IT department and police raising an alert against Petya ransomware that hit many multinational computers in Europe the other day.
Police sources said that it could not be ascertained whether it was Petya that hit the police computers as there was no demand for ransom. Experts from the Ransomware school at police Cyberdome, constituted following the recent WannaCry ransomware threat, were examining the computers.
The Kerala State IT Mission sent an alert to all government departments on Wednesday about Petya. They were advised to apply the patches to Windows systems available from Microsoft, update anti-virus software and avoid opening e-mail from unfamiliar addresses. Thiruvananthapuram range IG Manoj Abraham, who is the nodal officer of Cyberdome, said that after the WannaCry attack, the Cyberdome was equipped with modern tools to counter similar ransomware attacks.
According to an alert issued by Cyberdome, Petya ransomware affected about three lakh computers across the world during the last 72 hours. It does not encrypt personal files in targeted computers, but hits the master file table of hard drive and makes the master boot record inoperable.
