 "Photo: Reuters")
The WannaCry virus, which hit tens of thousands of computers worldwide, apparently hit some systems in the Andhra Pradesh secretariat too on Wednesday but the officials sought to play down the threat.
The virus attack came to light on Wednesday when a deputy secretary in the revenue department routinely sought to open his computer.
"The system didn't open and I immediately called the IT people. The virus attack was then discovered," the official said.
In the revenue department itself, nine computers suffered the same problem, causing fear among the government staff that their systems were "hacked."
As most of the computers in the state government run on Windows platform, they remained vulnerable to virus attacks.
Top bureaucrats, however, faced no problem as they use Apple systems.
Principal secretary (ITE&C) K Vijayanand said on Wednesday in a press release that nine hard disks from those computers were "removed as a precautionary measure" and scanned.
"The antivirus in these systems was not getting updated an hence we removed the hard disks, updated the antivirus and reinstalled them," Vijayanand said.
He said ports 137, 138, 139 and 445 in the firewall were blocked in both directions and latest Windows patches were updated in all desktops against WannaCry Ransomware as per Microsoft guidelines.
"No single system in AP Secretariat is affected with Ransomware," the Principal Secretary asserted.
