Tata Technologies, a multinational business that is into the sector of Technology engineering from India has released a press statement that whole of its IT services were suspended as a precautionary measure to mitigate cyber risks associated with the attack. However, the good news is that all the services that were facing suspension were restored to the fullest, within a time frame of just 3 hours, thus reducing the downtime scare to a large extent.
A ransomware attack is a kind of malware attack, where a hacking group targets the computer network of a public or private entity with malicious software that thereafter encrypts data until a ransom is paid.
In some cases, the hackers initially siphon data from the victimized servers and then encrypt the data. Thus launching a double extortion based attack in which they threaten the victim to leak the stolen data, if otherwise, their ransom demands are not paid heed on time. Strangely, the situation transformed into more difficulty in the past 4 years, and ransomware spreading gangs are calling or contacting the customers, partners or family members of the victimized companies and asking them to put pressure on the victim to pay the demanded sum in cryptocurrency for sure.
Rarest of the cases, hacking gangs target the same victim twice or thrice in a year, and make repeated ransom demands, to satiate their malicious funding needs.
Thus, the law enforcement is discouraging the victims from paying a ransom, and instead is urging them to report the instances to their departments, via proper channel. As there is no assurance that the threat actors will surely return the decryption key, upon receiving the ransom.
Tata Tech has an excellent team of IT staff who not are capable of recovering the data and applications from the incident. But can also audit the current security risks, to fill up with patches.
As of now, it is unclear on who launched the malware attack on the IT services giant. And a reputed news daily from the Indian Sub Continent suggest that it could be the work of a Russian gang, operating under the disguise of Chinese state funded actor.
