Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital says it suffered cyber attack in November
The statement came in the backdrop of an alleged ransonware attack on the AIIMS servers on November 23, which disrupted several patient services.
The Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi said on Saturday that it was hit by a cyber attack in November, but the damage was not as severe as it was for the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Hindustan Times reported.
The statement came in the backdrop of an alleged ransomware attack on the AIIMS servers on November 23, which disrupted several patient services. On Thursday, AIIMS said that the e-Hospital application, which is used for a range of services, had been restored. However, all hospital services were reportedly still running on manual mode.
The Safdarjung Hospital’s Medical Superintendent BL Sherwal said that the administration received information about the cyber attack on November 14, after computer operators were unable to log in to some devices.
“There was a cyber attack in our hospital system and servers were down but the National Informatics Centre [NIC] was able to revive the systems,” Sherwal said. He added that the attack was not ransomware, according to ANI.
Anuj Agarwal, the general secretary of the resident doctors’ association at Safdarjung Hospital, said that the institution’s services were not as severely disrupted as AIIMS since it carries out most of its operations manually.
“In AIIMS, from taking an appointment to printing prescriptions, everything is digitised,” Agarwal said. “In Safdarjung Hospital, most of our daily operations continue manually. That is a major reason why the impact was not as badly felt.”
In the case pertaining to the cyber attack on AIIMS, the Delhi Police registered a first information report under provisions of extortion and cyber terrorism November 25.
The police on Friday that forensic images of the affected services had been sent for analysis.
AIIMS has sought support from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-IN, to restore its digital services. CERT-IN is the nodal agency within the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that deals with cyber security threats.