In a major breach, the servers of the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh state power utilities went down after an alleged ransomware attack, the cyber crime police in Hyderabad said on Thursday. The TSSPDCL said that its website was hacked on April 29 and its web services like online payments had been affected.
Ransomware is a program that can get into your computer and lock you out, not letting you access your data until you make a payment to the hackers.
The cyber crime police which has registered a case under sections of the Information Technology (IT) Act, is investigating the case and guess that a staff member of the Telangana State Southern Power Distribution Company (TSSPDCL) received an email with the malicious software and clicked on it, following which the virus took control of the entire system. The Andhra counterpart of TSSPDCL was also affected.
The police expressed confidence that they could restore the system without paying any ransom.
“Works are on to rectify the glitch. The servers of Telangana Power Distribution Company are strong and there is enough backup of the data stored. The hacker demanded money in form of bitcoins but there is no need to pay it. The glitch will be rectified by Friday,” KCS Raghuveer, Additional DCP CCS (Cyber Crime) was quoted as saying.
According to media reports, the southern and northern power distribution companies of Telangana at Hyderabad and Warangal and southern and eastern power distribution companies of Andhra Pradesh at Tirupati and Visakhapatnam took a hit.
“The TSSPDCL website was hacked and affected services like online payments and other miscellaneous operations. This has no bearing on the operations of the company. The data of TSSPDCL is safe and other day-to-day operations like billing, internal activities in TSSPDCL are in operation. There is no impact on customer services like payment of bills in meeseva, e-seva, departmental counters and spot collection mechanism,” TSSPDCL CMD G. Raghuma Reddy was quoted as saying.