AIIMS Delhi Thwarts Fresh Malware Attack, Says 'Services Fully Secure, Functional'

JE News Desk:  Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, AIIMs was hit by a malware attack on Tuesday, the medical institute said. The premier medical institution said that the attempt of malware attack was successfully thwarted and the threat was neutralized in time and there was no loss of patient data.

“A malware attack was detected at 1450 hrs by the cyber-security systems in AIIMS, New Delhi. The attempt was successfully thwarted, and the threat was neutralised by the deployed cyber-security systems. The hospital services remain to be fully secure and are functioning normally,” tweets All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

A malware attack was detected at 1450 hrs by the cyber-security systems in AIIMS, New Delhi
The attempt was successfully thwarted, and the threat was neutralised by the deployed cyber-security systems. The eHospital services remain to be fully secure and are functioning normally

— AIIMS, New Delhi (@aiims_newdelhi) June 6, 2023

Later, the Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics and Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar claimed that someone may have tried accessing an internal portal (which is not available for internet users) and an alert was generated due to the security layer used by AIIMS. 

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 cyberincident or… https://t.co/pmfNpanIzd

— Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳 (@Rajeev_GoI) June 6, 2023

"http://E-Hospital.aiims.edu 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 cyberincident or breach. Error msgs have also been rectified now," Chandrasekhar clarified in a tweet.

Meanwhile, this was the second attempt to destabilise the AIIMS servers. A similar malware attack in November last year had disrupted most of the functions and patient services which took two weeks to restore.

In November, five physical servers of AIIMS, New Delhi on which e-Hospital application of the National Informatics Centre was hosted, were affected.

No specific amount of ransom was demanded by hackers though a message was discovered on the server suggesting that it was a cyber-attack. All the data for eHospital had been retrieved from a backup server which was unaffected and restored on new servers.

In the previous attack, most functions of e-Hospital applications of AIIMS like patient registration, appointment, admission, discharge were down and were restored after two weeks of the cyber-attack.