The Medical Research Council of India has revealed that they were recently hit by a cyber attack.
One ANI news reports citing unnamed officials claim that hackers tried to break into the website of India’s top biomedical research agency 6,000 times on Nov.
However, these efforts were blocked by the National Informatics Center (NIC), which hosts the ICMR website. The report notes that the NIC can also trace a hacker’s IP back to a blacklisted IP in Hong Kong.
WHY IT IMPORTANT
According to sources, ICMR was able to fend off such a massive cyber attack because its website is protected by the NIC’s firewall and other security measures. The site also hosts web portals and data for its various programs, which are also protected by a custom pfSense open source firewall. Furthermore, internet traffic on the website is strictly controlled and regularly monitored to detect any suspicious activity.
TREND TO BIGGER WOMAN
This hack adds to the number of documented cyberattacks aimed at India’s healthcare industry, which currently stands at 1.9 million this year alone, according to recent research by local cybersecurity consultancy CyberPeace Foundation.
In addition to ICMR, two hospitals are based in New Delhi, AIIMS Delhi and Safdarjung Hospital, also reported IT breaches last month. The former recovered its compromised data while no data was stolen from the latter during the hack.
Meanwhile, CloudSEK recently discovered that the sensitive information of about 150,000 of its patients Sree Saran Medical Center in Tamil Nadu is for sale on the dark web. However, the hospital has denied any recent unauthorized access to the patient’s records.
