More than 6,000 attempts were made to hack the server of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) recently but the hackers were not successful in their pursuit, according to official sources. The website, however, could not be hacked because of an updated firewall and enhanced security measures being adopted.
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is an Autonomous Organization under the Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Govt. of India. It is the apex body in India for the formulation, coordination and promotion of biomedical research, is one of the oldest and largest medical research bodies in the world. Reportedly the IP address of the hacker was found to be a Hong Kong-based blacklisted IP.
“The site is hosted at NIC Data Centre, the firewall is from NIC (National Informatics Centre) and is regularly updated. NIC was informed through email regarding a cyber attack and has reported that the attack was prevented. ICMR has found the website in the order. 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 report says, there was no website downtime after the cyberattack on ICMR. They did, however, point out that similar hacker attacks on the ICMR cyberinfrastructure are frequent, necessitating the strengthening of the infrastructure for cyber security.
