As India - among the various other countries continues to battle the ransomware - WannaCry attack, the Gujarat government on Wednesday asserted that the State IT infrastructure has largely remained unaffected by the cyber attack.

However, a top official from the Department of Science & Technology, Government of Gujarat, confirmed that some of the computers at district levels and at other government departments experienced the malware attack and were subsequently quarantined to stop the further spread of the virus.

“We have bifurcated the IT infrastructure in two segments, data center and end users. The data centers are vital installations and there is no impact on these. Secondly, at the end point users, we have about 60,0000 devices connected to GSWAN (Gujarat State Wide Area Network). Out of that, about 140-142 machines were reported to be infected. There is no threat on the data, because these machines did not have vital information or data on it, most of them were used by the office staff for routine administrative work,” Dhananjay Dwivedi, Secretary, DST, told BusinessLine .

Also, the private establishments, including companies and commercial set-ups, too have remained unaffected from the cyber attack that is understood to have affected over 200,000 computers across the globe.

“There has been no impact on private establishments and industry. There were proactive measures taken by the industry to protect their network such as blocking the e-mails with key words as the virus is mostly propagated through e-mails and certain types of websites. Also, common networks and social media are blocked along with mobile devices to keep the corporate network safe from the attack,” said Vivek Ogra, Chairman, Gujarat Electronics & Software Industries Association (GESIA).

The State government has also adopted a two-pronged strategy to tackle the cyber attack. First is the current containment of malware and ensuring the procurement of all IT-related products with pre-installed anti-virus for the government employees. The State government is also reaching out to users to avoid internet access outside GSWAN network and keeping anti-virus up-to-date.

“We never had a case where ransomware could affect the systems because of the absence of anti-virus on computer. But there is an area of concern, where we saw that many of the computers that got affected had parallel internet network other than GSWAN,” added Dwivedi.

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