SERVERS MAY TAKE THREE-FOUR DAYS TO REVIVE, SAYS AIIMS AS SALVAGE OPS CONTINUE

Officials at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, who are grappling with a six-day-long server outage following a cyber attack that has nearly immobilised the facility’s key services, on Monday said they expect online facilities to be restored in “three or four days”.

“Digital services will be restored in phases. Currently, all operations are continuing manually. Antivirus solutions have been installed in over 1,000 systems, out of around 5,500 systems. A complete sanitisation of the network is in progress,” a senior official from AIIMS said, adding that security agencies have managed to restore the National Informatics Centre e-Hospital database and application servers.

The hospital in a statement said the sanitisation operation was taking time due to the quantum of data and the vast network involved.

“Data restoration and server cleaning is in progress and is taking some time due to the volume of data and large number of servers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security,” said the statement issued on Monday evening.

The AIIMS statement came amid media reports that attackers, who have locked away access to the hospital’s primary server, demanded ₹200 crore in cryptocurrency as a ransom payment. However, hospital officials did not confirm these reports.

The Delhi Police, for its part, in a statement said, “No ransom demand as being quoted by certain sections of the media has been brought to notice by AIIMS authorities.”

Four physical servers, put in place to restore digital services, have also been scanned, said the senior officer quoted above.

Around 7am on Wednesday, the primary and the first backup servers of AIIMS were corrupted in what was later confirmed as a ransomware attack.