AIIMS services in Delhi hit by malware attack

Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), widely regarded as India’s foremost government hospital, was targeted by a possible cyber attack on Tuesday, with its servers affected for nearly four hours, hospital authorities and the health ministry confirmed.

“A malware attack was detected at 2.50pm by the cybersecurity systems deployed in AIIMS. The attempt was successfully thwarted, and the threat was neutralised by the deployed cyber security systems. The e-Hospital services are fully secure and are functioning normally,” a statement issued by the AIIMS administration said.

The incident occurred seven months after AIIMS was hit by a ransomware attack on November 23, which wiped outpatient and research data from its primary and backup servers, and affected the premier institute’s services for around a month. Another incident occurred on June 3, when aspirants of a nursing officer recruitment exam conducted by AIIMS alleged having received screenshots and photos of more than 20 questions, which were a part of the question paper.

Union minister of electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, speaking about Tuesday’s incident, denied a system breach.

“E-hospital is an internal application not available for internet users. Someone may have tried accessing this portal and alert generated due to security layer used by AIIMS. Same person may have taken a screenshot of error msg and circulated it. There is no cyber incident or breach. Error msgs have also been rectified now, (sic),” the minister tweeted.

AIIMS doctors said that the e-Hospital server was impacted since Tuesday afternoon, making it difficult for the staff to access patient files, test reports and other internal records. The slow server also impacted the patient load as the entire process of patient movement was delayed.

“Unlike what happened during the ransomware attack last year, we were able to open the server, but it was extremely slow. This was impacting the process of patient movement in the hospital because our entire system is digitised. We were not officially informed by the administration that this was a possible cyber-attack,” a resident doctor at AIIMS said, declining to be named.

Since the systems were impacted only for a few hours, there was no noticeable effect on patient care. However, some patients who were scheduled to collect their test reports had to wait for longer than usual.

“I was not aware of any cyberattack, but I was scheduled to collect some blood reports for my father and the nurses at the counter told me to collect it tomorrow since their systems were not showing the report status today,” said Malati Srikumar, whose father is undergoing treatment with AIIMS’s surgery department.

HT reached out to the AIIMS administration about the June 3 incident, but the hospital’s spokesperson, Dr Rima Dada, said, “We will not comment on the news of paper leak till investigations are complete. We are looking into this.”

Senior officials aware of the matter, however, said an initial inquiry into the alleged paper leak incident highlights that there could have been an attempt to hack into the hospital’s internal servers to get the question paper in advance. The hospital has involved the Central Bureau of Investigation to look into the allegations, a top official confirmed on Tuesday.

“We do not know if there is a connection between these two cases. This has to be confirmed by cyber experts,” the official said.