AIIMS Institute, one of India’s most prestigious hospitals came under a cyber attack and may have compromised the data of 3–4 crore patients. The servers have been down for 8 days in a row. The authorities on Monday issued a notice pointing that all services continue to take place in manual mode.
Apart from data leak the attack affected hospital’s digital services, including Smart lab, billing, report generation and appointment scheduling. The Authorities issued a statement saying, “The data restoration and server cleaning is in progress and is taking some time due to the volume of data and a large number of servers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security.”
The cyber attack at AIIMS is being looked into by the Delhi Police, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the India Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN). Meanwhile, The Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) division of the Delhi Police has filed a case of extortion and cyberterrorism.
However, Delhi Police refuted reports that hackers asked for Rs. 200 crore in cryptocurrency as ransom. “In the AIIMS Delhi cyber incident, no ransom demand as being quoted by certain sections of the media, has been brought to notice by AIIMS authorities.” said officials.
The hospital authorities have already suspended two system analysts. They have also been served show-cause notices for alleged dereliction of duty. The NIC e-hospital database and application servers have been back online in the interim. Other e-hospital servers at AIIMS that are necessary for the provision of hospital services are being scanned and cleaned by the NIC team.
AIIMS Delhi has decided to get four new servers from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) so it can resume its e-hospital facility for patients, said officials on Tuesday.