All India Institute of Medical Services, India's leading public medical institute, has been experiencing outages due to cyberattacks. This caused affected patients and doctors accessing the institute's services like patient admission, discharge, and billing systems.

As of the moment, the medical institution is now doing manual operations for them to continue their work even if the paperless system is currently down.

(Photo : SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images)
Hospital staff checks the health monitoring devices installed in a Covid-19 coronavirus ward of a Civil hospital in Ahmedabad on December 6, 2021.

India's Leading Medical Institute

All India Institute of Medical Services has been cyberattacked which caused outages throughout their whole system.

According to TechCrunch's report, the outages affected hundreds of patients and doctors in accessing their own records and other healthcare services of the company. This includes patient admission, discharge systems, billing systems, smart lab, report generation, appointment systems, and more.

The cyberattack happened in New Delhi and it appears that it is a ransomware attack, as confirmed by the authorities. With this, the attackers already modified the extensions of infected files. Officials of the institute stated that this attack impacted patient care services badly.

According to India Today, the attacked data was very sensitive as it includes the healthcare records of the Prime Minister, the President, former Prime Ministers, and other key ministers of India.

As both the authorities and institute try to solve the issue, AIIMS continues to operate as they temporarily go to manually write patients' notes by hand, including signing birth and death certificates by hand. While the cyberattack did not halt their operations, it resulted in long queues and errors in emergency situations.

"We are not able to send many blood investigations, request imaging studies and are not able to view previous reports or images. Many such operations are being done manually, which takes more time and is prone to errors," stated by a resident doctor in the institute.

While other doctors said that this is the first time that the system has been down for so long that their activities were affected badly.

The doctor suggested during the interview, "The NIC server needs a major upgrade. Today it was awful in OPD as well. It was totally at standstill. Even the blood samples or any tests whatsoever came to a halt."

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Resolving the Attack

As an aid to help the company to recover in this situation, Indian Express reported that the National Informatics Centre has been working with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team. Adding to this is that backups for restoring the data have also been taken care of.

For investigation, the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations of Delhi Police tries to resolve the case and know the motive of the cyberattack. A formal complaint was also lodged by the police department regarding this matter.

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Written by Inno Flores