Days after AIIMS and Safdarjang cyber attack, ICMR experiences 6000 hacking attempts in 24 hours

The cyber attack against the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) data lasted for a total of six days, and stopped the operations of the hospital, putting at risk the important data of crores of patients, including VVIPs like former Prime Ministers and MPs.

Just days after the cyber attack shook AIIMS and Safdarjung management in New Delhi, attempts were made to hack the data of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). According to media reports, there were as many as 6000 hacking attempts in the span of 24 hours.

While thousands of attempts were made to hack the data breech of the ICMR files, the government said that all attempts for the same were foiled, keeping the data secure. The government further said that the hacking attempts were prevented by the security firewall put up by the NIC.

The hacking attempts come close on the heels of the alleged ransomware attack that had paralysed online services at the AIIMS here. The officials said that hackers apparently from Hong Kong targeted the website of the Indian Council of Medical Research around 6000 times in a span of 24 hours on November 30.

"The contents of the ICMR website are safe. The website did not witness any downtime."The site is hosted at NIC Data Centre, hence the firewall is from NIC which they regularly update. The attack has been prevented successfully by the firewall/security measures of NIC," the official said.

In the wake of the hacking attempts, the Secretary of the Department of Health Research (DHR) and Director General of ICMR, Dr Rajiv Bahl, reviewed cyber infrastructure and security practices at ICMR on December 2, an official source said.

"It was briefed that the website of ICMR is hosted in the National Informatics Centre (NIC) cloud after a security audit by a CERT-IN empaneled agency. The website is protected by NIC firewall and other security measures.

"The ICMR also in-house hosts web and data portals of various programs of ICMR. The in-house infrastructure is protected by a customized open-source firewall (PFSense). Further, inbound and outbound internet traffic is strictly controlled and regularly monitored for any suspicious activity on all the active interfaces," the source said.

The Secretary, DHR directed that in light of the recent attack on AIIMS and other medical institutions, cyber-infrastructure security, particularly web portals and data, needs to be enhanced at ICMR.

It was decided that following best practices, the critical web and data portals will be migrated to Government Community Cloud (GCC). A request for proposal (RFP) for procuring GCC is already being prepared and is in the final stages, the source stated.

A proposal for developing an ICMR Data Centre (Delhi and Chennai) and a Disaster-Recovery site (Bangalore) is being developed on a turnkey basis. A network security audit of ICMR and various locations will be executed on an urgent basis, the source said.

(With PTI inputs)

READ | Delhi: Safdarjung Hospital hit by cyberattack after hackers cripple AIIMS