West Bengal electricity distribution board's computers hacked in a possible ransomware strike

According to reports, WBSEDCL staffers of its few sub-divisional offices in West Medinipur and South Dinajpur districts found in the morning that several computers, connected to internet, got hacked and could not be opened since then.

A WBSEDCL official claimed that the hackers are demanding 300 USD in a given deadline.

"Hackers have threatened to destroy all saved data from those infected computers if they are not paid 300 USD through Bitcoin currency system in a short deadline (by 6 hours since the computers got hacked)," a senior official of WBSEDCL told IBNS.

"We have informed the CID's cyber crime sections about the incidents and our engineers are still trying to restore the computers," the official added.

Due to the cyber strike, computer-based works at these sub-divisional offices of WBSEDCL have been disrupted since morning.

After Friday's global hit, another major cyber-attack is imminent on Monday, experts had alerted.

More than 125,000 computer systems were infected due to Friday's attack.

UK security researcher "MalwareTech", who helped to limit the ransomware attack, predicted "another one coming... quite likely on Monday", BBC had reported.

Spain, France and Russia were among more than 90 nations that were hit by the cyber attack.

The malware, known as WannaCry, was also affected the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS).

Pundits have suggested that the WannaCry malware spreads via a worm and has the ability to move around a network by itself, exploiting vulnerabilities inside a system upon entering it.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)