MMRDA guards itself against Locky virus

Learning from the Mantralaya’s experience with the Locky Ransom virus and its subsequent effort safeguard its computers, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA)’s IT department has instructed its officials to not use any third party websites for email purposes, blocking websites like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Rediffmail in its office.

A notice issued for all the MMRDA officials by the IT department, read, “Do not use Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail etc and prefer usage of official email solution for email communication. One should delete suspicious emails and links, without opening them. One should not notice visit unknown websites, such websites may harm your computer with viruses.”

A senior official from the IT department, said, “According to the existing norms, government officials are already bound to use official email id for communication for official work, but that has not happened due to various reasons. After the Mantralaya incident came into light we decided to once again remind the officials of not using third party websites for email communication. Taking a step ahead, we decided to directly block Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Rediffmail and other third party email websites. We also plan to block Facebook and Twitter in future.”

Whe the virus enters a particular system, it renames all the important files so that they have the extension “.locky.” As it also scrambles the files, the virus will ask you to pay up in form of bitcoins to get the decryption key. Hence, it has been named as Locky Ransom virus. The MMRDA has also started a new IT helpdesk for the officers to contact the IT department in case of any urgency or doubts on securing the data of MMRDA.

Last week, the IT department of Mantralaya had blocked mailing sites like Gmail, Yahoo and Rediff to avoid virus entering the systems of Mantralaya. The move came after some computers at Mantralaya fell prey to the virus.