The National Information Development Agency (NITDA) said yesterday it had yet to receive the report of the attack on any of establishment in the country.

A massive cyber-attack using tools believed to have been stolen from the US National Security Agency (NSA) has struck organisations around the world.

Cyber-security firm Avast said it had seen 75,000 cases of the ransomware – known as WannaCry and variants of that name – around the world.

There are reports of infections in 99 countries, including Russia and China.

Among the worst hit was the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Scotland.

But the NITDA’s Director General, Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, said though attack was not reported anywhere in the country the agency had put some measures in place to prevent it from spreading to Nigeria.

He said Nigerians should quickly report any abnormality noticed in their computer system to: help@cerrt.ng, support@cerrt.ng, incident@cerrt.ng.

He said the ransomware attack was exploiting vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating System especially those not currently supported such as Windows XP, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003.

“Microsoft released a patch for the vulnerability in March and machines that were updated with the patch would have been automatically protected”, Dr Pantami said.

Furthermore, the NITDA DG said should any system be infected by the ransomware, it should be isolated from other network to prevent the threat from further spreading.

In addition, he said, the following action could be taken immediately: remove the system from network, do not use flash/pen drive/external drives on the system to copy files to other systems, format the system completely, and contact NITDA’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team for assistance. (Daily Trust)

Update news