As the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) server remained out of order for the sixth consecutive day, Delhi police said that no ransom has been demanded by hackers. Certain sections of the media stated today that hackers have allegedly demanded an estimated Rs 200 crore in cryptocurrency. Delhi Police told ANI, “In the AIIMS Delhi computer incident, no ransom demand as quoted by certain sections of the media, has been brought to notice by AIIMS authorities.” While AIIMS issued a statement saying, “The data restoration and server cleaning is in progress and is taking some time due to the volume of data and a large number of servers for the hospital services. Measures are being taken for cyber security.”
Medical services run in manual mode
“All hospital services, including outpatient, in-patient, laboratories, etc. continue to run in manual mode,” added the statement. Earlier on Saturday, AIIMS authorities said that they have deployed additional staff to run diagnostics, labs, and OPD services at the national medical institute as its servers remained suspended due to a suspected ransomware attack.
AIIMS E-Hospital down
On Thursday, AIIMS issued a fresh set of Standard operating procedures (SOP) which says admission, discharge, and transfer of patients will be done manually at the hospital till the E-Hospital is down.
“Latest SOPs that have to be followed in manual mode till E-Hospital is down. Admission, discharge, and transfer are to be done manually at AIIMS, New Delhi. Indent to be done manually,” the hospital had said.
Earlier on Wednesday, AIIMS reported a failure in its server. The server has been down since Wednesday, and the officials have manually managed the OPD and sample collection.
The AIIMS said that measures to restore the online services are on and it has also sought support from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Informatics Centre (NIC) on the same.
“The servers for the National Informatics Centre`s e-Hospital being used at AIIMS, New Delhi was down due to which outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services including, smart lab, billing, report generation, the appointment system, etc., have been affected. All these services are running on manual mode currently.”
“National Informatics Centre (NIC) team working at AIIMS has informed that this may be a ransomware attack that is being reported and 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),” AIIMS said in a statement.