AIIMS servers still down 4 days after cyber attack

NEW DELHI: Doctors from the All-india Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi said on Saturday that government agencies were working to restore data at the “earliest” as the hospital’s server remained affected for the fourth consecutive day in a suspected ransomware attack.

Administrative work at the national medical institute continued on manual mode on Saturday with many patients complaining they have been waiting for OPD and test appointments for the past three days.

At 7am on Wednesday, the primary and first backup servers of AIIMS were corrupted and it was later found to be a ransomware attack.

In an incident report sent by the hospital’s medical director, Dr M Srinivas, to the union ministry of health and family welfare, the hospital said the first call was received at the computer facility from the emergency lab regarding the latter’s inability to view reports in the National Information Centre (NIC) laboratory system. Similar reports were soon received from the billing section and other areas.

At 8am, OPD counters also reported the same error.

The Delhi Police’s Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) cell filed a First Information Report invoking sections of cyber terrorism (Information Technology Act, section 66F) against unknown persons, while teams of NIC and Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) attempted to restore the network.

On Friday, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) was also roped in to probe the hacking.

AIIMS authorities have deployed additional staff to run diagnostics, labs and OPD services due to increased manual work.