business

Updated: Sep 24, 2014 05:40 IST

Hackers broke into the server of the country’s biggest airport operator, the Airports Authority of India (AAI), taking away crucial data and sending the government organisation into a tizzy.

AAI has filed an FIR with Delhi Police’s Cyber Crime Cell and ordered an internal probe to investigate the matter and trace the source of the attacks.

“A multi-level information security breach happened on the night of July 19. On examination it was noted that disk volumes have been deleted from the storage system,” AAI said in response to a query from HT.

“The disks have given to a specialist organisation for cloning and attempted data recovery,” AAI added.

On September 17, a high-level meeting chaired by the aviation secretary directed AAI to “switch over to NIC portal till their server becomes completely operational”.

On the morning of July 20 the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system was found to be inoperative.

ERP contains all data relating to human resources, finance, material management and project system functions covering all of the 125 airports run by AAI across the country.

The system also handles payroll accounting for its nearly 19,000 employees. The system has also been integrated with the legacy systems such as electronic tendering and procurement system, airport information management system etc.

“A number of security steps such as dual-factor authentication with one-time password for all critical servers, storage and network devices have been put in place,” an official said.