KE admits it experienced 'cyber incident', customers may experience disruption

Karachi’s largest electric utility provider K-Electric has said that it experienced an attempted cyber-incident earlier this week.

The power company in a statement said all critical customer services including bill payment solutions and 118 call-centre are operational and fully functional, to ensure the integrity of our systems, as a precautionary measure, we have isolated few non-critical services. As such customers may experience some disruption in accessing duplicate bills from the KE website.

As an alternate, duplicate bills may be availed from the nearest K-Electric Customer Care Centre.

“The KE teams have initiated consultation with international information security experts and are also collaborating with local authorities in this regard,” it said.

The statement comes after the sole electricity provider for Karachi suffered a ransomware attack that led to the disruption of billing and online services.

As per details, amid the attack K-Electric customers have been unable to access the online services for their account, and the company appears to be trying to reroute users through a staging site. Furthermore, K-Electric could not issue electricity bills to its consumers in various regions as its billing system became non-functional after the attack.

The cyberattack has affected KE's Windows computers and backups, and hacked encrypted data is no longer usable. Furthermore, the software purchased to protect against hacking has also been affected by the attack. 

When contacted by Business Recorder, the utility provider said that there is a technical issue pertaining to the IT department, however, the company is trying to resolve the issue at the earliest.

“Any inconvenience to customers is regretted as the power utility is following cyber security protocols,” it said.