No, IIT Madras servers were not hacked – Latest News | Gadgets Now

NEW DELHI: IIT Madras has confirmed that the institute was not affected by a ransomware attack last week as reported by several media publications. Media reports claimed that a ransomware attack had locked the work of students, researchers and others on the IIT Madras network and the attacker had demanded money to decrypt the locked files. However, it turns out that the ransomware scare was false and just that the one of the email servers were down for some time which was later fixed. Assistant registrar Rashmi Uday Kumar confirmed the same and denied the entire “ransomware attack” story.

IIT Madras in an official statement said, “One of the email servers at IIT Madras was down temporarily and has since been restored. All emails on this server were backed up and no emails were lost. No other services of the institute were affected. The cause is under investigation.”

Media reports claimed that the institute’s servers were affected by the so-called ransomware attack on February 19 and attributed this to a researcher who had shared an image of a threat message that he had seen when logged in.

The message read:

“ALL YOU IMPORTANT DATA HAS BEEN ENCRYPTED…. We will give you the decrypted file and assign the price for decryption all files. After we send you instructions on how to pay for decrypt and after payment you will receive a decryptor and instructions. We can decrypt one file in quality the evidence that we have the decoder.”

While the institute has strongly denied any such claims, students were reported to be taking personal backup of their work and important files.

Education domain is one of the most “at-risk” industries in India, with the sector accounting for more than 30% of cyber threats targeting enterprises in the country between July and September 2019, as per a report from Seqrite, the enterprise arm of IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies.

Other industries that remain at high risk include manufacturing, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), media and entertainment and professional services.

This post “No, IIT Madras servers were not hacked – Latest News | Gadgets Now” is originally from Gadgets Now published on 2020-02-26 16:38:53. Hope you have liked the post. Don’t forget to share it using the social share buttons below this post.

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