A cyber attack took place on the server of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, disrupting several patient care services, The Times of India reported on Wednesday.
The National Informatics Centre said that the incident was a ransomware attack, in which hackers demand money to restore access to online services, The Indian Express reported.
“Today [Wednesday] the server for National Informatics Centre’s Hospital being used at AIlMS, New Delhi was down due to which outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services including, smart lab, billing, report generation, appointment system etc, have been affected,” the institute said on Wednesday. “All these services are running on manual mode currently.”
Till late on Wednesday, the services were still running in manual mode.
The institute has sought support from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-IN, to restore digital services. CERT-IN is the nodal agency within the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that deals with cyber security threats.
Visuals by the Hindustan Times showed long queues at the institute on Wednesday as services slowed down due to the cyber attack.
In October, AIIMS Delhi announced that its operations will be paperless from January 1, 2023. The head of the institute, M Srinivas, had issued an office memorandum in this regard to all heads of departments, chiefs of centres and nodal officers in this regard.
On November 18, the institute had also said that all payments would go completely digital from April 1, 2023.
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