AIIMS Delhi, one of the renowned hospitals of the world, lost access to digital infrastructure because of a ransomware attack that occurred in the early hours of Wednesday this week. And information is out that doctors lost access to medical records resulting in severe chaos in treating the patients. The incident came into light today when another Indian news daily Times of India made the cyber attack details public.
AIIMS aka All India Institute of Medical Sciences has informed the details to the Indian Government and the CERT-IN and they found out in a probe that the compromised server belonged to the National Informatics Centre.
A Ransomware is a kind of malware attack where hackers steal information from a database and encrypt it until a ransom is paid. If the victim fails to pay the demanded sum, then the threat actors sell the stolen data on the dark web.
Smart Lab services, digital billing, report generation, appointment systems, medical reports access and other IT infrastructure of the New Delhi based hospital were affected in the attack and restoration services are underway.
Unconfirmed sources state that AIIMS is not interested in paying the ransom of Rs 200cr in BTC and is instead looking to recover data from an efficient data continuity plan that is already in store. It has directed all its staff members to manually write data on paper and is currently waiting for the Union Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology for further guidance.
NOTE- The hospital authorities announced in October this year that all their services will be paperless from January 1st of 2023.
