Flood monitoring systems in the Indian state of Goa have been hit by a ransomware attack, with attackers demanding payment in cryptocurrency to decrypt data from flood monitoring stations. Now they are making measures in data disaster and recovery.
In a complaint to the Goa Police Cyber Team, the state government’s Water Resources Department, which has been maintaining the data, said all files had been encrypted and could no longer be accessed.
“The server has been cyber-attacked by ransomware. All files are encrypted with the extension eking and cannot be accessed. In a pop-up window interface and prompt file, the attacker asks for payment in bitcoin encrypted currency to decrypt the data. This attack Occurred on June 21, 2022 between 12 midnight and 2 am. The integrity of the data has been altered to make it impossible to back up previous data. The complaint filed by executive engineer Sunil Karmarkar states: “The server is on 24×7 internet Working on the wire, since there is no antivirus software and firewalls are outdated, attackers can easily succeed.
The complaint was filed on June 24 and came to light today.
The data center servers in Panaji store data from flood monitoring systems at 15 locations on Goa’s main rivers to monitor the river’s water levels. The system is used as part of disaster management in order to control flood situations.
Data from flood monitoring systems, automatic rain gauges and weather gauges are stored on servers at the Ministry of Water Resources headquarters in the state capital, which are maintained by ASTRA Microwave Products Ltd in Hyderabad.
As a result of the hack, the department now has no access to data related to battery voltages at different sites, as well as packets related to 12 sites, and lost all old data, which can no longer be backed up locally, and due to the entire The state is experiencing vigorous monsoon activity and also lost real-time data on rivers that are currently at water levels.
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