AIIMS hobbles back, no clarity on patient data yet

NEW DELHI: 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, India’s foremost government medical care centre, 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

AIIMS STATEMENT

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.

“Agencies are doing their jobs but the worst-case scenario is that we might have lost all data and will have to rebuild from scratch. Our biggest concern is VIP patient data,” said the AIIMS official, asking not to be named.

Ransomware have over the last five years become one of the main cyber crimes, with the motive usually being financial as companies cough up millions in dollars to regain access to their data. In case of sensitive targets, such as a hospital like AIIMS, this also poses an espionage and national security risk.

Since the attack came to light early on Wednesday, teams from the Computer Emergency

Response Team (Cert-In) and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) have been struggling to retrieve data from a secondary backup that officials said may have been unscathed from the malware.

But, seven days on, there seemed to be no headway.

On Tuesday, the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU) was roped in to rebuild the hospital’s security system, helping the agencies already at work to conduct security assessments and to strengthen the firewall, the person cited above said. “The digital services will be restored in a phased manner. Currently, all operations are continuing in manual mode. Anti-virus solutions have been installed in over 1,500 systems, out of around 5,000 systems. A full sanitation of (AIIMS’) network is currently in progress,” a senior official from AIIMS said on Monday, asking not to be named.

All hospital services, including outpatient, in-patient, labs, etc continue to be run on manual mode.