Guwahati: As passengers of several flights of SpiceJet witnessed some unexpected delays on Wednesday, the airline said its systems faced an “attempted ransomware attack” on Tuesday night.
SpiceJet said that the attempt had impacted and slowed down flight departures on Wednesday morning.
The airline in a statement said that the problem was solved and flights began operating normally by 8:30 am on Wednesday.
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The airline in a tweet said, “Certain SpiceJet systems faced an attempted ransomware attack last night that impacted and slowed down morning flight departures today. Our IT team has contained and rectified the situation and flights are operating normally now.”
Some passengers on board the flights claimed that they were kept inside the flights for more than four hours after boarding.
It may be mentioned that ransomware is a type of malware from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim’s personal data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid.
While some simple ransomware may lock the system without damaging any files, more advanced malware uses a technique called cryptoviral extortion.
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It encrypts the victim’s files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them.
In a properly implemented cryptoviral extortion attack, recovering the files without the decryption key is an intractable problem – and difficult to trace digital currencies such as Paysafecard or Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are used for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult.