Cyberattack On Top Indian Hospital Highlights Security Risk (apnews.com) 5
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The leading hospital in India's capital limped back to normalcy on Wednesday after a cyberattack crippled its operations for nearly two weeks. Online registration of patients resumed Tuesday after the hospital was able to access its server and recover lost data. The hospital worked with federal authorities to restore the system and strengthen its defenses. It's unclear who conducted the Nov. 23 attack on the All India Institute of Medical Sciences or where it originated.
The attack was followed by a series of failed attempts to hack India's top medical research organization, the Indian Council of Medical Research. This raised further concerns about the vulnerability of India's health system to attacks at a time when the government is pushing hospitals to digitize their records. More than 173,000 hospitals have registered with a federal program to digitize health records since its launch in September 2021. The program assigns patients numbers that are linked to medical information stored by hospitals on their own servers or in cloud-based storage. Experts fear that hospitals may not have the expertise to ensure digital security.
"Digitizing an entire health care system without really safeguarding it can pretty much kill an entire hospital. It suddenly stops functioning," said Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the Free Software Movement of India. That is what happened to the hospital in New Delhi. Healthcare workers couldn't access patient reports because the servers that store laboratory data and patient records had been hacked and corrupted. The hospital normally treats thousands of people a day, many of whom travel from distant places to access affordable care. Always crowded, queues at the hospital grew even longer and more chaotic. Sandeep Kumar, who accompanied his ill father, said the digital attack meant that appointments couldn't be booked online, and that doctors could do little when they saw patients because they couldn't access their medical history.
The attack was followed by a series of failed attempts to hack India's top medical research organization, the Indian Council of Medical Research. This raised further concerns about the vulnerability of India's health system to attacks at a time when the government is pushing hospitals to digitize their records. More than 173,000 hospitals have registered with a federal program to digitize health records since its launch in September 2021. The program assigns patients numbers that are linked to medical information stored by hospitals on their own servers or in cloud-based storage. Experts fear that hospitals may not have the expertise to ensure digital security.
"Digitizing an entire health care system without really safeguarding it can pretty much kill an entire hospital. It suddenly stops functioning," said Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the Free Software Movement of India. That is what happened to the hospital in New Delhi. Healthcare workers couldn't access patient reports because the servers that store laboratory data and patient records had been hacked and corrupted. The hospital normally treats thousands of people a day, many of whom travel from distant places to access affordable care. Always crowded, queues at the hospital grew even longer and more chaotic. Sandeep Kumar, who accompanied his ill father, said the digital attack meant that appointments couldn't be booked online, and that doctors could do little when they saw patients because they couldn't access their medical history.
Not hard to believe (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
While I have met competent and dedicated it people in doing IT in hospitals, their level of frustration was evident. Typically short staffed, they complained the executives rammed packaged all in one solutions on them, then blamed them when they didn't meet expectatations. Medical people love to think more money is the answer to everything.
This is true not just in the Medical field but in all others as well. IT gets very little respect and what little budget we do get, tends to be stolen by other departments.
Microsoft’s digital India vision /s (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Both these things ought to be killing offences. Well, they are, but for patients.