30.6.20

NHAI servers down for 24 hours after virus attack

The systems of India’s highway authority were hit by a severe ransomware attack on Sunday resulting in all servers, email and IP phone systems, which use internet protocol, going dead for nearly 24 hours. Sources said the virus attack could have compromised the NHAI’s data and information and a detailed diagnosis is being conducted to find out what happened, the source of attack and the consequences.

Several officials of the National Highway Authority of India said the system was down till Monday evening and the authority had also alerted the NIC about the problem.

In a late night statement the highway authority said, “A ransomware attack on NHAI email server took place yesterday (Sunday) night. The attack was foiled by the security system and email servers were shut down from safety point of view. The system is restored now. No data loss took place. NHAI datalake and other systems remained unaffected from this attack.” Datalake is the central depository of all information related to projects.

However, some of the IT experts said that a detailed forensic investigation into this would bring out the exact details of the source of attack and whether there is any data loss or stealing of the data from NHAI servers.

NHAI sources said the details of the diagnosis would be out on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, some IT experts said once there is a virus attack, there is every probability of the information stored in servers getting compromised.

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