New Delhi: Months after a massive cyber attack in it All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, the government has yet to give a satisfactory answer as to what happened to patient data that was encrypted and may have been extracted by hackers.
The sensitive data of 40 million patients, including political leaders and other VIPs, were potentially compromised in the hack.
According to sources, the AIIMS server was hacked by the Chinese. The government has maintained that services were restored and patient data repopulated into the system, but the bigger question is what happened to the compromised data? Did they reach the dark web?
Could non-state persons have accessed it?
The attack was analyzed by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and found to be caused by incorrect network segmentation.
According to the Minister of the Union for State of Electronics and Information Technologies, Rajeev Chandrasekharthe attack was carried out by unknown threat actors.
In a written response to the Parliamentthe minister said that CERT-In and other stakeholders have recommended the necessary corrective measures to prevent such incidents from happening again in the future.
The number of cyber security incidents in India has been on the rise, with 4.5 million cases reported and traced in the last five years. chandrasekhar he said in his reply.
This highlights the need for organizations to have strong cyber security measures in place to protect their sensitive information.
Speaking to the IANS news agency, Pawan Duggalthe founder and president of International Commission on the Cyber Security Act, said that the time has come to wake up after the AIIMS ransomware attack.
“It is time to make specific legal provisions to deal with ransomware. In the United States, it has now become a crime when someone pays a ransom, because it is said that they are helping the cybercriminal,” Duggal said.
“Whenever cybercrime occurs, it is often accompanied by a cybersecurity breach. That means we can now see them not as distinctive silos, but as overlapping fields. And therefore legal frameworks and awareness raising are required. people about these new — emerging avatars and manifestations of cybercrime are needed,” Duggal said.
“Throughout the world, countries are in a similar position to India, except that the challenges for India are too great. Most cybercrime activities are targeting Indians,” he added.
