Ransomware attack cripples AIIMS services

“Today 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. All these services are running on manual mode currently,” said a statement issued by the institute.

The National Informatics Centre (NIC) team informed that the attack has been reported and will be investigated by appropriate law enforcement authorities.

“Measures are being taken to restore the digital services and support is being sought from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Informatics Centre (NIC). AlIMS and NIC will take due precaution to prevent future such attacks,” the statement added.

The service at the institute remained affected till late night and the hospital services ran on manual mode.

According to doctors working at the institute, they were not able to generate barcodes to send samples, they were not able to see imaging and reports of patients as well.

“This is the first time it has been down for so long and hampered our activities. Previously there have been many instances of server down but those were minor. Now we will have to make the registrations manually till the time it is fixed,” said a resident doctor on condition of anonymity.

“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,” said another doctor.

He added that a number of patients left because of the slow manual registration process.