Ministry of Home Affairs sources said some ATMs all over the country have been closed down as a preventive step following concerns against the virus attack.
Amidst reports that India is among the worst affected countries from the Wanna Cry ransomware attack, the Indian government has shut down some ATMs all over the country as a preventive measure against the cyber attack.
Ministry of Home Affairs sources said some ATMs all over the country have been closed down as a preventive step following concerns against the virus attack.
The computing giant says the tool used in this current attack had been developed by the US National Security Agency and was stolen by hackers.
It is highly critical of the way governments store data on software vulnerabilities.
Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said on Sunday: "We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on Wikileaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world.
MHA officials are closely monitoring the situation.
In the meantime, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has issued an advisory asking all banks to put in place a software update at ATMs to prevent their systems from a malware that has attacked payment systems across the world.
The RBI however denied that they have issued any direction to shut down ATMs.
"RBI has not given any direction or issued any advisory to banks to shut down their ATMs. Wrong information is floating around that RBI has instructed banks to shut down ATMs," an RBI spokesperson said.
ATMs ARE HIGHLY VULNERABLE
In a separate malware attack last year, 3.2 lakh debit card were compromised in the country. Data of the users who transacted from ATM machines of Hitachi were compromised during three months of May, June and July last year. The Hitachi ATMs deployed by many White Label ATM players and Yes Bank were impacted by the malware.According to reports Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) are highly vulnerable to such malware attacks as they presently run on old version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, making a software security patch update a necessary exercise.
There are a total of 2.2 lakh ATMs in India, of which many old ones run on Windows XP.
Updating your computer if you're an individual is a piece of cake, but for a network the size of Britain's National Health Service? Tough - time-consuming, expensive and complex.