Noida: Merely a month after Haldiram Snacks Private Limited corporate office in Noida suffered a ransomware attack, the servers of another Noida-based sweets manufacturing company were hacked and their data was encrypted in a different format that that which the company uses.

According to the company, the incident took place on the afternoon of August 22 at the corporate office of Mithaas sweets in Noida’s Sector 63.“Our company server was hacked and there was a ransomware implanted between 3-4pm. All our transactional data was encrypted in a different format, which was inaccessible to us and became completely useless. There was a ransomware screen which asked us to contact them on a particular email id in order to decrypt the data back to the original format,” said Sumit Chowdhary, director (operations).

He added that when the company contacted their anti-virus provider, they were advised not to engage with the ransomware. “They said that the hackers may then be able to hack into our email as well. So we never replied to the mail. All our data is still there in the encrypted form. We are hoping that technical experts will be able to decrypt it eventually,” said Chowdhary.

The company has 12 sweets outlets of across the national capital region, while the main factory and corporate office is located in Sector 63. Based on their complaint, a case has been registered at the Phase 3 police station against unidentified hackers under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code. Officials said that a police complaint was submitted by the firm after the incident took place, however, the matter was probed by the cyber cell before an FIR was registered. “The cyber cell is investigating the matter and will share the necessary information with us. They are working on tracing the IP addresses of the hackers. Once that is done and they are identified, we will nab them,” said Jitendra Dikshit, station house officer, Phase 3 police station. On July 13, the servers of Haldiram Snacks were hacked by unidentified persons and their data was stolen. In exchange, the hackers had demanded Rs 7.5 lakh to release the information. A case had then been registered at the Sector 58 police station on October 14.

Police officers said that once the hackers are identified, only then will they be able to tell if the same group is behind both the ransomware attacks or not.

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