Key government networks well-protected from ransomware: IT Secretary

New Delhi: The government has installed necessary security in batches to protect its key networks from the cyber attack by ransomware virus `WannaCrypt`, Information Technology Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said on Tuesday.

"On ransomware, since March, the government of India has been on high alert. We have already installed the necessary security in batches as far as the government key networks are concerned," said Sundararajan at the inaugural session here of Broadband India Forum.

"We have not got any reports of widespread infection. There have been very few isolated instances and we continue to be on watch," she added.

Sundararajan said that apart from five or six isolated instances, there are no reports of any significant damage in the country.

"CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which is the national agency which monitors and tracks this activity, has affirmed that in India, there were five or six isolated instances, one of about 18 computers of the police in Andhra, as well as about five odd instances, one in Kerala where one of the Panchayat computers were affected," she told reporters here.

"Apart from that, there have been very small fragmented, isolated machines, standalone machines which have been affected. Overall, there was no report on any kind of substansive scale to indicate that Indian systems have actually been affected."

The IT Secretary added that a multi-agency monitoring team is already continously monitoring and assessing the situation on a round-the-clock basis.

Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday had said the cyber attack by ransomware virus `WannaCrypt` had nearly zero impact in India.

"We are strengthening our cyber security. After talking to Microsoft, we had asked people to install patch system in March. This ongoing attack not only had minimum, but nearly zero percent impact, in India. We are strengthening our areas," the Minister had said.

Speaking about the IT sector, Sundararajan said: "It (the IT sector) is continuing to grow at 7-8 percent, it is forecast to grow at that rate. It has created five lakh jobs in the last two years."

"There may be some changes in the profile of work or the profile of verticles within the IT sector because that is a dynamic sector. But we have it on categoric record from the industry that large scale job losses have not hampered at all. There is nothing unusual in the pattern of the employment scenario as far as the IT sector is concerned," she said.