A total of five servers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) were affected by a recent cyber attack, which led to the encryption of approximately 1.3 terabytes of data.
Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) evaluated the cyber attack on AIIMS, which faced a cyber attack in November. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) evaluated the cyber attack on AIIMS. However, AIIMS servers were managed by them only, the minister said in his written reply.
“As per preliminary analysis, servers were compromised in the information technology network of AIIMS by unknown threat actors due to improper network segmentation, which caused operational disruption due to the non-functionality of critical applications,” the minister said.
He also said 4.5 million cases were reported and tracked in past five years. A cyber security incident resulted in the hacking of the hospital’s primary and backup servers, resulting in the loss of data from e-hospital software that had become obsolete.
The hospital’s services, including outpatient, inpatient, and laboratory services, will continue to operate manually until the issue is completely resolved. The institute ongoing sanitization effort on all computer systems and networks.
The e-Hospital data on the servers were restored subsequently. According to official sources, a team of the Central Forensic Lab (CFSL) has been pressed into service to check the infected server of the AIIMS Delhi to identify the source of the malware attack.
“It is clearly a conspiracy and it has been planned by forces that are pretty significant. It is a sophisticated ransomware attack. We will wait for the outcome of CERT-IN (Computer Emergency Response Team) and NIA (investigations) before we come to conclusion on who is behind the ransomware attack,” Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar had said on December 2.
A high-level NIA team along with the India Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), Delhi Police and the ministry of home affairs are investigating the ransomware attack.
