48,000 ransomware attack attempts detected in India: Quick Heal Technologies

Over 48,000 ransomware attack attempts have been detected in the country, with West Bengal witnessing the most incidents,  a cyber security firm said on Tuesday.

Quick Heal Technologies has "detected over 48,000 MS-17-010 Shadow Broker exploit hits responsible for 'WannaCry ransomware' outbreak in India", it said in a statement.

"Our observation is that the attack is not focused towards any particular industry but it is widely spread across industries especially those organisations which are online and connected", Quick Heal Technologies' managing director Sanjay Katkar said.

The Pune-based company said 60 per cent of the attempts by the malicious WannaCry ransomware were targeted at enterprises, while 40 per cent were on individual customers.

Read more: Ransomware Cyber attack: RBI directs banks to operate ATM networks only after software updates

It said there have been over 700 distress calls by customers in the last few days, following the discovery of the attacks which has impacted 150 countries globally.

The top five cities impacted by the WannaCry ransomware are Kolkata followed by Delhi, Bhubaneshwar, Pune and Mumbai, while the top five states with maximum detections are West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat, NCR (Delhi), and Odisha, it said.

The company claimed it "successfully detected" the ransomware activity and "cleaned the malicious file responsible for file encryption from all the attacked systems".

It said computers running on the desktop and server editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system are most impacted.

"Systems which did not apply a patch update for this vulnerability were affected by the WannaCry ransomware which uses worm-like behaviour to affect vulnerable systems on the network", it explained.

Read more: Ransomware Cyber attack: With 200,000 victims across 150 countries, virus a 'wake up call' for Govts across the globe: Microsoft

Indian computer systems have largely escaped a global ransomware attack as the government and companies installed security patches to gain an upper hand against the first wave of an unrivalled global cyber attack.

Over two lakh computers in at least 150 countries are said to have been infected, according to Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency. In India, only a few isolated incidents in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat were reported.