K-Electric, Pakistan’s main power producers and the only supplier in Karachi City, have experienced a ransomware assault crippling the whole billing infrastructure. The attackers are asking for $7 million in ransom in Bitcoin, according to a report from the cybersecurity company Bleeping Machine.
The power supplier has more than 2.5 million customers and K-Electric engineers first found out about the ransomware attack on 7 September. The company experienced a billing process outage, but the availability of power was not impacted.
An “NetWalker” ransomware was deployed to infiltrate the network. This malware was first applied to Microsoft Windows applications such as Workplace, Phrase, and Excel in 2019 and is popular with many hackers.