AIIMS not alone, healthcare sector faced 1.9 mn attacks in ‘22

A report by cybersecurity thinktank CyberPeace Foundation and security consultancy Autobot Infosec Pvt. Ltd showed that the sector faced a total of 1.9 million cyber attacks till 28 November. The attacks came from 41,181 unique IP addresses which were traced to Vietnam, Pakistan and China.

Last week, New Delhi’s AIIMS was hit by a massive cyberattack forcing the country’s top government-run hospital to close many of its servers and switch to manual operations. The institute, which had earlier announced plans to digitize all services by April 2023, denied reports claiming that the hackers demanded a ransom of ₹200 crore.

According to security firm IndusFace, India was the second-most targeted country in terms of attacks on the healthcare sector. The company said that of the 1 million attacks it detected on its healthcare customers every month in 2022, 278,000 were from India. Around 80% of these attacks targeted internal Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), customer service portals, ticketing systems and developer tools, it said.

The CyberPeace Foundation’s report also showed that attackers mostly targeted vulnerable internet-facing systems, including remote desktop protocol (RDP), vulnerable server message blocks (SMB) and database services, and old Windows server platforms.