HYDERABAD: ISRO on Tuesday, in response to a report in these columns, has called the alert about the Trojan, XtremeRAT, in one of their computers as a “false positive”. The space agency on Tuesday announced that there was no infection of XtremeRAT on their systems. ISRO is also considering a separate mechanism for “responsible disclosure” of such incidents directly to its IT team.

“Subsequent analysis revealed that it was a false positive i.e. a software detected an issue which was actually not present. It mentioned a victim IP address/ Port infected with XtremeRAT,” announced ISRO through their website. “However, this was a UTM Port, not mapped internally to any systems. Nevertheless, the reported Port was disabled as a precautionary measure and was enabled later through an alternative mechanism.”

“An error from shodan seems not very probable. Sounds like a lie but I don’t really care as long as they have fixed the issue,” was all Robert Baptiste had to say about the ISRO response.On Monday, Express had reported that researchers had stumbled upon an ISRO port that was infected with a malware and had reached out to them to fix the issue. ISRO had responded to the researchers saying, “the UTM login port was not mapped internally to any systems.”