THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Foreign cyber attack on software for radiation treatment at Regional Cancer Center (RCC) in Thiruvananthapuram, where people from other states also come for treatment. The software that administers radiation to patients and two key servers that store the health information of more than 20 lakh people were hacked on Monday morning.
Servers storing the surgical, radiation and pathology results of lakhs of patients were attacked. It is suspected that the aim was to sabotage the treatment and follow-up examinations of the patients. If the software is tampered with, patients will receive the wrong radiation. This can be life-threatening. 500 patients receive radiation treatment every day.
Radiation treatment has been stopped since Monday and can be resumed only by Friday. The hackers claimed responsibility and sent an e-mail from abroad. Cryptocurrency worth billions of rupees has also been demanded. Chinese and North Korean hackers are suspected. The operation of the treatment equipment was disrupted after the virus attack on the servers. The radiation software did not work on Monday morning and then got hung. The 'Pax' software where the scan reports were uploaded also crashed. It was confirmed as a cyber attack in an expert examination. Hackers took advantage of the flaw of using older operating systems despite having the system to combat this.
Data recovered
The Cyber Police and Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-K) recovered the data through emergency measures. How many records have been lost will become clear only in the forensic examination. An investigation has been started to find out what kind of attack happened and from which country. It is the first of its kind on Govt hospitals in the state.
AIIMS model attack?
Annual RCC patients: 2.75 lakhs
Patients who come for further treatment: 2,58,000
New patients each year: 17,000
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