The National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) have announced it lost vital data last week when their internal IT system was infiltrated by malware (malicious software). 

According to the corporation’s executive director, Silver Mugisha, the IT server was hacked into the IT server on Thursday last week and they have since recovered some data.

According to Mugisha, some of the affected departments are the internally-developed IT systems for financial management, human resource management, customer care, procurement and inventory management.

While speaking to the media on Thursday, Mugisha, says their normal operations were affected but they have since established the problem and are fixing it. He says their rectification involves getting an independent IT forensic security expert to establish the cause of the problem.

 “We carried out an initial assessment and the immediate findings revealed that some of the servers had been affected by malware and could not function as required. We reverted to the data recovery site for business continuity of the critical systems, especially customer services,” he said.

 Without pointing to whether the infiltration was an internal; job or not, Mugisha says their findings will guide NWSC on short, medium and long term strengthening measures.

 “But I am aware that  most sound institutions always outsource the management of their information security systems because however good the information security management systems of such organizations may be, there can always be that one wrong element who can decide to malice the systems when they have been angered,” he said.

 Mugisha has however asked  all customers’ not to panic as their  payment records are still up to date.He adds that in the meantime they will read from meters manually until next week when the online system will be fully resettled.