Computers and IT systems at one of the major public sector units, Oil India Limited (OIL) remain shut on Tuesday as the entity’s registered headquarters at Duliajan in Assam’s Dibrugarh district came purportedly under cyber attack, said a company spokesperson.
The systems have been shut down since Monday and efforts were being made to resolve the issue, said OIL spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika, quoted by the news agency.
“We have been forced to withdraw all our computer systems from LAN connection after it came to our knowledge that three to four computers were hit by a virus Monday.” No computer at the headquarters now has access to internet connectivity, he said.
“The IT department is yet to ascertain the extent of damage. OIL is working on solving the issue. Previously too OIL faced such problems, but this time it seems to be a major IT-related crisis which will take time to resolve,” Hazarika added.
Several incidents of hacking of government agency’s IT systems have been reported recently.
The official Twitter account of the Indian Meteorological Department was hacked last week with a random tweet tagging hundreds of Twitter accounts. MD Director-General Mrutyunjay Mahapatra had said that the Twitter account “has been hacked, we are trying to restore it.”
Notably, on the intervening night of Friday and Saturday last week, the official Twitter account of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) was also hacked by unidentified miscreants. However, the UP CMO’s Twitter account was restored later. The Uttar Pradesh government has initiated a probe by cyber security experts over the matter.
University Grant Commission’s official Twitter account was also in the fray when it was hacked in the early hours of Sunday as the hackers changed the display picture and background picture of the account. The hacker had made a series of tweets tagging hundreds of users.
