Advisory to be issued against ‘Reaper’ virus

Mumbai: Maharashtra’s cyber cell will issue an advisory to take precautions from a worldwide virtual attack of a virus, ‘Reaper’, which has not affected India so far. The virus is suspected to be 20 times larger than typical malware that infect IT devices. The Reaper allows cyber criminals to hack groups of devices including Wi-Fi routers and personal computers, causing them to crash.

On Wednesday, inspector general of police (Cyber) of Mahrashtra, Brijesh Singh tweeted an alert against ‘Reaper’ saying, “Massive cyber storm gathering, beware about it. Reaper IOT already spread and it’s 20 times larger than Mirai.”

Mirai is malware that turns networked devices running the Linux operating system into remotely controlled ‘bots’ that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks.

Mr Singh told The Asian Age, “We will issue an advisory soon about the Reaper. This attack can ruin everything at a massive level.”

According to cyber experts, the Reaper botnet (a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled as a group without the owners’ knowledge, e.g. to send spam) will terrify the world with its effect and could bring down the entire Internet. The Reaper’s attacks began only recently but has affected up to one million devices. In June, India was attacked by the ransomware ‘WannaCry’ which allegedly affected two lakh people in over 150 countries. It was believed to be the biggest-ever recorded cyber attack. At that time, cyber experts had advised users and organisations to apply patches to their Microsoft operating system Windows to prevent getting infected by the attack.

What’s ‘Reaper’ virus?
Has not affected India so far
Is suspected to be 20 times larger than typical malware that infects IT devices.
Allows cyber criminals to hack groups of devices including Wi-Fi routers and personal computers, causing them to crash.