NEW DELHI: Chaos ensued at the Centre-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Wednesday after the apex institute witnessed a cyber attack on its main and backup server, which adversely affected the patient care services in the hospital, sources said.
After the attack, both servers faced shutdown. A team of cyber experts from the National Informatics Centre cut off the link of the second backup server to prevent further damage, sources added. However, the cyber attack has corrupted all the files stored on the main and backup servers of the hospital. Tech experts are trying to recover the lost data, sources said.
The incident led to disruption in a range of hospital services, including appointments and registration at the outpatient department, billing at the in-patient department, laboratory report generation, and smart lab, among others.
However, the hospital did not wholly confirm the cyber hacking and only shared the possibility of a ransomware attack on its e-hospital feature which was recently integrated to facilitate patient care services digitally. “The National Informatics Centre team working at AIIMS has informed that this may be a ransomware attack which is being reported to and will be investigated by appropriate law enforcement authorities,” the hospital said.
Sources also said he demanded a huge amount by email with a warning that the extent of the cyber attack could also extend to other services. Meanwhile, a probe has been launched, with AIIMS reporting the incident to the police.
The outage caused tremendous inconvenience to patients, as several services which were recently integrated into the e-hospital manual to facilitate digital delivery of facilities in the hospital, had to be done manually, leading to hassle and delays.
“With the server being down, the OPD and sample collection were handled manually but the sample system for those who do not have a Unique Health Identification was affected. The patients were not able to register themselves or make an appointment digitally or on-site for a very long time,” a source said. The cyber attack comes close on the heels of AIIMS announcing the complete digitisation of all hospital services by April 2023.