Covid-19: 17 new cases in Andhra Pradesh, 13 traced to Nizamuddin meet

A day after the Telangana government announced the death of 6 coronavirus patients from the state - all linked to Nizamuddin visit in Delhi, 17 new positive cases were registered on Tuesday. Thirteen of the new cases have been traced back to the religious congregation at the Markaz Tablighi Jamaat.
With the additional 17 new cases in a single day, the total number of confirmed coronavirus patients in Andhra Pradesh has jumped to 40, spread across nine out of the thirteen districts in the state. Prakasham and Guntur districts have registered the largest number of 11 and 9 coronavirus cases respectively.
It may be noted that most of many of those who attended the Markaz religious congregation in Nizamuddin have either tested positive or are being tracked and kept in quarantine in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Authorities of both the states are continuing their efforts to trace those who had attended the Markaz meeting in hundreds, in a bid to put them in quarantine facilities.
According to the AP government's medical bulletin, the five of the 17 people tested positive for coronavirus infection are found to have visited Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia while some of them have also attended the Delhi meeting. The infected vary between the range of 10 to 65 years of age. Overall, 30,000 persons are under the government surveillance for potential infection of coronavirus.
Though Telangana has relatively lower number of people under surveillance for potential infection, the number of confirmed cases stand as high as 72 apart from 6 deaths, mostly concentrated in the city of Hyderabad.

Last week Telangana government said the number of people under quarantine have declined to 13,000 from a level of over 20,000 persons as people were allowed to go home after completing the mandatory 14 day period in the quarantine facilities created by state medical and health department.

Hackers demand six Bitcoins for Telangana, Andhra power portals restoration

International News

Hackers, who attacked websites of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh state power utilities, have demanded six Bitcoins (nearly Rs 20 lakh) as ransom to give description key to restore the sites, police said Friday.

T Srinivas, Director (Projects and IT) of Southern Power Distribution Company Limited (SPDCL), assuring no data breach said the website of their organisation is open and that of Northern Power Distribution Company Limited is in the process of restoration.

"They (ransomware attackers) demanded six Bitcoins. Normally the attackers leave a link for paying ransom. In this case the websites were restored to normalcy even before they sent the link. We are continuing our investigation," Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber Crimes) KCS Raghu Vir told PTI.The official further said the link which the malware leaves for ransom cannot be traced and previous history of ransomware attacks proved they originated from Central Europe and some African nations.

Srinivas said the websites and systems are managed by TCS and experts from the IT giant have flown in to restore them."Our website is open now. There is no harm to the data. Our servers are secured," he said.

A staff of the Power Distribution Company of Telangana Thursday received a mail from an unknown person and when he inadvertently clicked on it, the virus (ransomware) attack took over the entire system.Along with the Telangana systems, the computer systems of power utilities in Andhra Pradesh also came under the malware attack because they are linked to each other, police had said.

 When contacted, K Vijayanand, Chairman and Managing Director of Transmission Corporation of Andhra Pradesh Limited, said experts from TCS were working on restoration of the site and there was no impact on the billing activities for AP utilities.