NEW DELHI: Weeks after a cybersecurity attack hit operations at one of India’s largest hospitals, investigators said they were investigating possible ties to China.
Two email IP addresses used in the hacking attack on India’s major government hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), are said to originate from China’s Henan province and Hong Kong.
Authorities traced the server address to China, but experts say it doesn’t necessarily mean the hackers are there.
India’s Ministry of Home Affairs and the National Bureau of Investigation’s Counter-Terrorism Task Force are investigating the hack.
Experts warn that the attack has highlighted the urgent need to bolster critical and core sectors due to India’s failure to adopt cybersecurity protocols.
The government drafted a data privacy bill, but experts in the field say the country doesn’t have enough protections in place.
Cybersecurity expert Pawan Duggal said that in the event of an attack like the one targeting AIIMS, “nobody knows what to do” and no agency has an SOP (standard operating procedure). says.
“This is a given reality, and we need to remind ourselves that the sooner we prepare, the sooner we prepare for public-private partnerships, the better it will be. I can’t handle the challenges,” he said.
The attack could hamper India’s efforts to digitize health records and thwart government efforts to create a database that would allow Indians to access their health records in seconds at any hospital.
cyber security attack
The hospital, which treats more than 12,000 patients daily, was attacked on 23 November.
Medical institutions were unable to enroll new patients, and physicians could not access medical records or reports.
It was later revealed that five servers containing data on more than 30 million patients, including health records of former prime ministers, top politicians and bureaucrats, were compromised in a cyberattack.
It took weeks for hospitals to restore access and governments to secure the system.
second big attack
Days after the attack on AIIMS, 6,000 hack attempts were made on the website of the Indian Council of Medical Research, the country’s premier medical institution.
Hospitals across the country are currently reviewing their cybersecurity measures. But India’s vulnerabilities are not limited to the health sector alone.
