The attack on India’s premier medical research institute’s website comes at a time when AIIMS servers have been down for two weeks due to a ransomware attack.
With AIIMS servers already hacked, the cyber attackers have intensified the attacks on other health and research organisations website and patient information system in India.
“On Nov 30, the cyber hackers tried to attack the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) website for more than 6000 times in a span of 24 hours,” a government official from National Informatics Centre (NIC) on condition of anonymity told MoneyControl.
When asked about the details of the attackers, the official said that the series of attacks on ICMR website was made from Hong Kong based blacklisted IP address 103.152.220.133.
“The attackers were blocked, they couldn’t succeed. We have alerted the team about it. If the firewall had some loopholes, then the attackers might have succeeded in breaching the security of the website,” the NIC official said.
The ICMR officials refrained from comment on this story.
According to the official, the NIC has asked the government organisations to keep the firewall updated.
The NIC guidelines are to be followed religiously. The government organisations have been advised to update the security patches of operating systems, he added.
The official said that the patient information system in health organisations has been among the top potential targets for the hackers.
“The cyber-attacks on the Health Organisation’s website have been on the rise since 2020,” he added.
– moneycontrol