India’s premier healthcare institution, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), is the latest victim of cyber attacks. The attack resultless in a server outage that also affected daily operations at the hospital. As per officials, this was a ransomware attack.
Cert-In and National Information Centre (NIC) are investigating the outage that has now crossed 36 hours. AIIMs servers are still down affecting the hospital’s business.
Ransomware attack is a kind of cyberattack where malware encrypts the victim’s files and asks for a ransom to restore access. If victims fail to pay the ransom, they risk losing access to the data.
The Delhi Police’s Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) team has also filed an FIR against unknown persons under sections of cyber terrorism (IT Act, section 66F). Investigations are going on and cyber teams are working on restoring the network.
In many cases, ransomware victims didn’t get their data even after paying the ransom. A report atom Sophos revealed that around 92 percent of organizations do not get all the data back.
If you have visited AIIMs recently for any medical treatment, your data including name, age, and previous medical records may be in the hands of cybercriminals. So, you need to take a little extra care. Cybercriminals can use this data to perform social engineering attacks to further harm you.
Ransomware has recently become a primary tool for cybercriminals. If we look at the primary targets, Education, Government, and Healthcare companies are the primary targets of cybercriminals. Most cybercriminals use LockBit ransomware. Between March 2022 and August 2022, LockBit has racked up 430 known attacks in 61 different countries. The USA is still the primary target country of ransomware attacks.
Also see: Best Ransomware Protection Tools: Anti-ransomware Tools
