Functioning of several KMC key departments has been crippled due to recent cyber-attacks. Kolkata: Waiting to pay property tax? Is it taking inordinately long to get a slot for birth/death registration?
Some IT department officials said on condition of anonymity that the services have been unavailable because of “scheduled maintenance and audit of e-governance infrastructure” at West Bengal State Data Centre housed in Moni Bhandar in Salt Lake. No state govt official was willing to speak on record. The data centre hosts Bengal govt portals, consolidates e-governance applications and also serves as a repository of critical govt data.
Among the services hit were downloading of birth and death certificates from Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, payment of online tax through Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s website and key services on the labour department’s website, officials said. A large volume of the state finance department’s data has gone missing, the officials said. The ones hosted on the Central govt’s National Informatics Centre are working well,” said a source. The disruption followed a technical glitch at State Data Centre, according to officials. However, several IT experts who work closely with the state govt have raised concerns that the disruption could be linked to a possible “malware or ransomware” attack. The experts have been working round the clock to restore the affected services, officials said. The data recovery centres have also “failed to retrieve a significant portion of the lost data”, according to several IT experts who work closely with state govt.
“The affected websites are all hosted on State Data Centre. They also raised questions about the efficacy of the Security Operation Centre under West Bengal Cyber Security Centre of Excellence (WB-CSCoE), which has been set up for monitoring, analysing and defending critical IT infrastructure against cyber threats. You Can Also Check: Gold Rate in Kolkata | Silver Rate in Kolkata | Bank Holidays in Kolkata | Public Holidays in Kolkata | Kolkata AQI | Weather in Kolkata | Petrol Price in Kolkata | Diesel Price in Kolkata | CNG Price in Kolkata | LPG Price in Kolkata