NO CLARITY ON PATIENT DATA AS AIIMS LIMPS BACK

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in Delhi said on Tuesday that it was able to restart its main ehospital digital utility, but services could take at least a couple of days to come back online and there was no clarity yet on whether the critical database containing patient records and test reports can be retrieved.

The facility was hit by a cyberattack last week, forcing operations to be managed on paper for the last seven days as close to 5,000 computers were knocked offline. The attack – bring probed as an incident of cyber terrorism -- has been attributed to ransomware – the unknown entity behind it has sought an undisclosed amount of money as ransom – and there are fears that highly personal data of millions of patients could be at risk of leak. “The ehospital data has been restored on the servers. The network is being sanitised before the services can be restored. The process is taking some time due to the volume of data and a large number of servers/computers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security,” said a statement issued by AIIMS on Tuesday.

“All hospital services, including outpatient, in-patient, laboratories, etc continue to run on manual mode,” it added.

A person aware of the matter explained the restoration was of the ehospital utility and did not imply the databases had been retrieved.