On Wednesday, New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Services (AIIMS) reported a massive cyberattack on its servers. Following the attack, the leading public medical institute is facing outages that severely affected digital patient care services including billing, appointments, and laboratory report generation. The services were running in manual mode, causing delays and long queues at the hospital. AIIMS has announced to go completely paperless from January 2023 and the complete digitalization of all hospital services from April 2023.
The cyberattack is suspected to be ransomware. A complaint has been filed with the Delhi Police invoking sections of cyber terrorism (IT Act, section 66F) against unknown persons. Officials said that measures are being taken to restore the digital services and support is being sought from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Informatics Centre NIC. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations of Delhi Police, are investigating the incident and the people behind the attack.
According to the hospital’s statement issued on Wednesday, “measures are being taken to restore the digital services and support is being sought from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Infomatics Centre.” The statement further added, “AIIMS and NIC will take precautions to prevent such future attacks.”.
AIIMS-Delhi is one of the biggest government hospitals in the country. It caters to around 1.5 million outpatients and 80,000 inpatients every year. AIIMS holds thousands of medical undergraduate and postgraduate students and has a capacity of over 2,200 beds. Being, the country’s most prominent government hospital, it also treats high-ranking officials.
