No mobile hotspots, external routers for internet inside AIIMS compound after recent cyber attack

NEW DELHI: The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on Wednesday issued fresh directive to tighten the cyber security after the ransomware attack on its servers more than a week ago. 
In view of the major cyber attack that has jolted the digital patient care delivery services at AIIMS, the institute has resorted to take additional measures to tighten the cyber security in the campus.

In its additional security measure, the top medical institute has asked everyone to not create mobile hotspots within the hospital premises and no LAN or router should be connected to the institute’s network.

“No router/hub etc. should be connected to AIIMS network port by any user. Also, no computer system (desktop/laptop), which is on AIIMS LAN, may be connected to mobile hotspot,” an internal circular accessed by this newspaper, read. “This is done to prevent the attackers use any external device for hacking further into the network,” a department official said. Meanwhile, the hospital is trying to recover the data saved on main and back-up servers. 

“The e-hospital data has been restored on the servers. Network is being sanitized before the services can be restored. The process is taking some time due to the volume of data and large number of servers/computers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security,” the institute said in a statement.

However, sources said that the data that the institute claims to have restored is only a chunk saved on the second back-up server which was saved from ransomware attack. “Only 30-40% data would have been recovered. The major share was uploaded on the main and back-up server which is still under hacker’s control,” an official said. All work continues to happen manually.