Oil India Limited's field headquarters in Assam's Dibrugarh district has faced the biggest cyberattack ever, and faced the biggest IT crises as a section of the desktop computers have been shut down after malwares were found in them. Hacker demands Rs 57 crore from Oil India Limited after planting malware in computers, an first information report has been lodged in Assam

After the preliminary investigation, it came to the notice that OlL's network, server and clients systems are facing network outage. Earlier, the company said three to four computers were "infected due to malware. These are standard tactics of hackers who use ransomware to intimidate the target entities.

It is a virus, it is a fairly severe and strong virus. It has impacted some of our servers — restoration will take some time. We are also taking the help of external experts,” OIL spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika, Public Relations, Corporate Communication, Oil India Ltd, in Duliajan said and he further says, that there had been no data breach so far. “This is the biggest attack that we have faced in recent years.

"As a precautionary measure, we had to withdraw many computers system from LAN connection after it has come to the knowledge that three to four computers are infected due to the virus and malwares. Internet connectivity remains restricted, however, this has not impacted any of our servers de-align with production and back-end business operations," added Hazarika,

The computers with the malwares have been identified and restoration work was underway. "Our drilling work and other works have been going on but some of our computers are not functioning. We have identified the computers and started our restoration work. We have taken help from international security expert to solve the crisis," added Mr Hazarika.

Dibrugarh Superintendent of Police (SP) Shwetank Mishra said hackers had asked for a ransom of 196 Bitcoins — which comes up to approximately Rs 60 crore. Police are still investigating the source of the attack.

The company said in its complaint that the public sector undertaking had “incurred a huge financial loss” because their business transactions have been affected but it does not quantify the loss.