TNI Bureau: All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, on Tuesday said its e-Hospital data has been restored on servers and the network is being sanitised before services can be restored. The server restored after 7 days.
The AIIMS said in a statement that all hospital services, including outpatient, in-patient, laboratories, etc continue to run on manual mode. 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.
It is feared that the data of around three-four crore patients could have been compromised due to the breach detected on November 23.
The AIIMS spokesperson, however, would not confirm or deny media reports that the hackers had allegedly demanded that the hospital pay them an estimated 200 crore rupees in cryptocurrencies.
The India Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), Delhi Police and representatives of the Ministry of Home Affairs are investigating the ransomware attack.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) team at AIIMS reported last Wednesday that the institute’s servers were down and that a ransomware attack might be to blame.
A first information report under Section 385 of the Indian Penal Code (Putting person in fear of injury in order to commit extortion) and Section 66/66F of the IT Act pertaining to computer-related offences had been filed with the IFSO against unidentified persons, according to Prashant Gautam, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations (IFSO), on Thursday.
On the first day of the attack, there were lengthy lines at the hospital because the server had been down since the morning. Doctors and nurses said that although things improved, people still had to wait longer in lines.
A hospital employee who works as a doctor claimed that while there was a lot of turmoil and uncertainty on the first day of the attack, things are now much better. The doctor said that whereas earlier appointments could be made online, doing so now required human labour. The physician stated, “We are working extra hard to make sure that patients are not having much difficulty.”