New Delhi: After the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) of the national capital Delhi, Safdarjung Hospital has become a victim of cyber attack. The hospital authorities have given this information on Saturday. According to officials, the damage caused by the cyber attack was not as severe as that suffered by AIIMS. The hospital runs OPD services manually so it was not serious. Let us tell you that the server of AIIMS remained down for the 11th day today.
Dr. BL Sherwal, Medical Superintendent of Safdarjung Hospital, said, “There was a cyber attack. Our server was also down for a day in November, but the data was safe. It was handled by IT, the National Informatics Center (NIC), which revamped the system.” Dr Sherwal said the cyber attack was not ransomware. Another hospital official said that the IP had been blocked.
Whereas, a senior resident doctor said, “For only one day in November, we heard that the servers were down for some time, but later they were back on. Most of the time we do our work manually.
According to AIIMS Delhi, services are to start manually in the middle of next week, meanwhile around 3,000 computers have been scanned and antivirus has also been uploaded for future protection. But internet services are still blocked and no further information has been shared by the administration with the faculty and staff of the hospital.
According to sources in AIIMS Delhi, two analysts were suspended on Monday for data breach and others are under the radar. A special cell of the Delhi Police has started an investigation into the alleged malware attack at AIIMS Delhi.
Earlier on Tuesday, AIIMS had also issued a statement saying that the data of the e-hospital has been restored. The statement said that the e-hospital data has been restored on the server. The network is being cleaned up before services are restored. The process is taking some time due to the volume of data and large number of servers/computers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security. All the hospital services including outpatient, in-patient, laboratories etc. run on manual mode.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has also joined the probe, news agency ANI quoted sources as saying. Representatives of India Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), Delhi Police, Intelligence Bureau, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) are already probing the incident. The Laboratory Information System (LIS) database and other dependent databases have been restored.
Chinese hackers hand suspected
The investigation into the incident of hacking of computers at AIIMS has pointed towards the role of China-based hackers, sources told TOI. The probe also suggests that the hackers may have started putting the data for sale on the dark web as their demands were not met, the source added. This has raised fears of confidential data of lakhs of patients, including politicians, having been leaked. Officials are, however, denying that any data has been compromised. Investigation has confirmed that five main servers were targeted by the Chinese hackers who subsequently put it on the dark web.
