Indian Council of Medical Research, shortly known as ICMR, was hit by cyber attacks on November 30th, 2022, and reports are that hackers made over 6,000 attempts to breach the firewall in a time frame of just 24 hours.
The good news is that the firewall of ICMR did not have any vulnerabilities, so the threat actors failed to infiltrate the network.
The web portal of ICMR was being hosted on the servers operating in the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and as per the preliminary inquiries, the attack emerged from Hong Kong-based IP addresses 103.152.220.133.
Officials from NIC confirmed that no data was compromised in the incident, unlike in the cyber attack launched on the AIIMS server leading to fraudulent access of about 3-4 Crore patient’s data and a ransom threat of Rs 200 Crore in BTC.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Delhi, admitted the attack as a part of a bigger stratagem.
It is unclear why the hackers are behind the medical records of Indian Citizens. But unconfirmed sources report that Chinese intelligence could be behind the incident/s.
NOTE- Developed nations like the United States, China, and Russia have a penchant to conduct espionage on other countries’ military, political, geographical and political intelligence. And they are trying different ways to gather classical information, such as through spies, espionage-related tools, undercover officers, and other forms. One such tactic is infiltrating servers and deploying software tools that gather and transmit information to servers based in other nations. Also, all these countries have been indulging in such tactics since 2012. With the USA using the NSA to conduct espionage since 2012, Russia using GRU since 2017, and China using various APT groups to know about the flaws of other nations.
