NEW DELHI: After reeling under a major cyber attack for a week, AIIMS New Delhi got a breakthrough on Tuesday night. The top hospital claimed to have recovered data from e-hospital software that became redundant after the institute’s main and backup servers were compromised in a cyber security incident last week.
However, it will take days to restart the digital services at AIIMS due to the sanitization drive the institute is carrying out on the whole networks and all computer systems. The hospital’s services, including outpatient, inpatient, and laboratory services, will continue to operate on a manual basis until then.
“The e-Hospital 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 the large number of servers and computers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security,” the institute said in a statement.
The data restoration claim by the institute came after a meeting convened between the officials of the Union Home Ministry and the National Investigative Agency (NIA) in the evening regarding the AIIMS incident, sources said.
Meanwhile, internal sources called the claim by AIIMS a mere “face-saving” technique. “Only two options are presented in ransomware attacks—either agree to the demand raised by the hacker or initiate an alternative to the service affected by ransomware,” a senior IT official who is privy to the development said. Reportedly, the hacker has demanded Rs 200 crore for the data of 4 crore patients held at ransom.
However, Delhi Police, which is also probing the cyber attack incident, denied the media reports about the ransom demanded by the hacker. No further clarification on the data restoration claim was given by AIIMS when contacted.
Meanwhile, the institute has asked its faculty, staff and other members using the AIIMS intranet to install a specific antivirus software—SEQRITE ENDPOINT—amid the cyber security threat, sources informed.
The formatting and sanitization of all servers and computers in the institute are under way, they added.
The cyber attack that was reported on November 23 forced the hospital to shut down all digital services in the patient care delivery areas.