After AIIMS, top medical body ICMR's servers under cyber attack: Report

On November 30, hackers made 6,000 attempts in 24 hours to breach the ICMR server firewall, according to a NIC official

Hackers have intensified attacks on the server of the top medical body, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), reported Moneycontrol citing sources.

The report quoting an official from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) said that on November 30, hackers made 6,000 attempts, in 24 hours, to breach the ICMR server firewall. According to the official, an attack was made from a Hong Kong-based blacklisted IP address, 103.152.220.133.

ICMR's website is hosted at the NIC Data Centre, which according to the official, is updated regularly. The server firewall did not have any loopholes, and thus the attack attempts were unsuccessful. The ICMR has found the website in order, said the official. 

"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 attack on ICMR comes just days after the ransomware attack on the All India Institute of Medical Sciences' (AIIMS) server that affected almost all the hospital sections. Because of the attack, AIIMS Delhi servers have been down for over ten days. The institute is still operating in manual mode and trying to recover the data.

On December 4, Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital also faced a cyber attack, but the damage was not as severe as the attack on AIIMS, according to media reports.