India’s AIIMS medical institution reports ransomware attack

November 29, 2022
New Delhi India South Asia AIIMS Healthcare Ransomware Cyberattack

The hospital servers of New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) have been attacked by an unknown ransomware group, as announced by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The Indian medical institution’s daily activities, including blood sample reports and OPD registrations, have been paused as investigations progress.

The announcement came after some of AIIMS’s medical staff and patients reported difficulty accessing servers.

 

Hospital staffs were forced to work in manual mode while the affected NIC servers used at AIIMS were getting fixed.

 

As explained in NIC’s statement, the servers for their institution being used at AIIMS in New Delhi have been temporarily down, which affected several medical services, including appointment systems, billing, report generation, and smart lab, among others. While investigations and technical issues are in progress, all the affected services will be run manually.

NIC stated that they have informed the relevant authorities regarding the issue and will investigate promptly. These authorities include the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Informatics Centre (NIC)’s cybersecurity team. The institution also assured that additional security measures would be applied to prevent similar incidents from reoccurring.

Some resident doctors at AIIMS who observed the service disruption said they could not generate barcodes for sample sending and could not see patients’ imaging and reports. They also added that they have never experienced such downtime of services for a long time that impeded their medical activities. Previous technical issues were only minor; thus, the current incident has affected their operations severely.

Manually performing activities that the incident had hampered caused frustration among the healthcare experts, adding that numerous patients have left due to the slow manual registration processes.

While this cyberattack incident is still under investigation, our security researchers will remain on the lookout to provide updates. People who the security incident could potentially impact, such as medical staff and patients at AIIMS, are advised to be vigilant against threats of malicious attack attempts.

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