India Institute of Medical Science successfuly repels malware attack
Take action: Although government institutions are rarely good at cybersecurity, here's a positive example. Regular offline backups and network segmentation of servers helps a lot in malware attack, as well as commitment of the technical team to detect and react quickly.
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The All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) in New Delhi successfully prevented a malware attack on its eHospital services after its website, ehospital.aiims.edu, was targeted.
AIIMS stated that its cyber-security systems detected and neutralized the attack, and assured that its e-Hospital services were fully secure and functioning normally.
Of the 100 servers — 40 physical and 60 virtual — five physical servers were infiltrated by the hackers. Data in the five servers has been successfully retrieved.
Unfortunately, no details were provided as to the source and methodology of the attack nor the defensive mechanisms that stopped the attack. It's very probable that successful data recovery was due to well implemented backup processes.
The Indian government also denied any data breach, with the Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT explaining that the error message circulating may have been generated by someone attempting unauthorized access.
In a separate incident in November, AIIMS faced a ransomware attack that affected its systems, leading to temporary manual operations, and it was reported that the cyber attack originated from China.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare confirmed that although five servers were infiltrated, the damage was contained and the data successfully retrieved.
