AIIMS Delhi servers continue to remain hacked, and hackers are now reportedly demanding Rs 200 crores in cryptocurrency, sources have told PTI. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is one of the most popular medical organisations in India, and it is expected that as many as 4 crore patients’ data has been breached due to the incident.
AIIMS Delhi is also the preferred hospital for ministers and other politicians in the country. Therefore, the India Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), Delhi Police and representatives of the Ministry of Home Affairs are investigating what could be the biggest ransomware attack this year. The source has also told PTI that since servers are down after the attack, the laboratory, emergency, outpatient and inpatient wings are being manually managed at the moment.
Several studies have stated that ransomware is on the rise especially after the pandemic. Organizations in the Asia Pacific region are reported to be 80 percent more prone to cyber-attacks than the global average, due largely to the speed and scope of growth in the region’s digital use and connectivity. The average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack for businesses in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) has increased by more than US $1 million. In what makes matters worse, only 5 percent of the organisations receive their controls back even post receiving the ransomware.
Some of the common ways to protect organisational data from ransomware is by ensuring data integrity and availability for key business assets, migration from on-premise to SaaS solutions, orchestrating response to automatically contain threats, identifying anomalous data and activities, and automating the recovery and complete and clean data.
