2 weeks after cyber attack, AIIMS data retrieved fully, services back, says govt

More than two weeks after the AIIMS cyber attack, Minister of State for Health Bharati Pravin informed the Lok Sabha on Friday that all the data has been retrieved from an unaffected backup server with most of its services also being restored.

Responding to a question, Pawar said no specific amount of ransom was demanded by the hackers though a message was discovered on the server that suggested it to be a cyber-attack.

An FIR has been registered by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences with the special cell of the Delhi police, regarding the attack, the minister said in her written reply.

Five physical servers of AIIMS Delhi on which the e-Hospital application of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) was hosted, were affected. All the data for the e-hospital has been retrieved from a backup server which was unaffected and restored on new servers.  

"Most of the functions of e-Hospital applications like patient registration, appointment, admission, discharge etc have been restored after two weeks of the cyber-attack," Pawar said in the written reply. 

The national nodal agency for responding to cyber security incidents -- Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) -- has "Empanelled Information Security Auditing Organisations" for auditing including vulnerability assessment and penetration testing of the computer systems, networks and applications involving public service delivery including Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).

Immediate measures were taken by AIIMS to enhance security like endpoint hardening, string firewall policies and network segmentation to secure all the data of the institute, the minister stated.

Setting up of 22 new AIIMS and 75 projects of upgradation of existing government medical colleges or institutions by way of setting up of super speciality blocks or trauma centres have been approved under the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY) to reduce the patient load on the Delhi hospital.

They are at various stages of offering inpatient and outpatient services to the needy.  

The day-to-day operations or surgeries as well as associated activities and record keeping was done in a manual mode. In AIIMS Delhi, the dashboard for the real-time emergency bed availability has been developed in-house, the reply stated.