While the word 'ransomware' may have caught on only in the last few days – with the WannaCry cyber attacks wreaking havoc across the world – one of Delhi's top hospitals, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, had suffered such an attack a year back, reported The Times of India.
The attack, however, was on a small scale, and did not harm Sir Ganga Ram Hospital's sensitive information, according to Niranjan K Ramakrishnan, the chief information officer at the hospital.
The malware used in this attack was Cryptowall and not WannaCry. However, both come under the ransomware category and use the same tactic, which is locking out a user from his/her data and then demanding a ransom payment in the form of virtual currency Bitcoins if he/she wants to access it.
The impact of the malware was limited as it affected only three systems – running on the vulnerable Windows XP – which were then isolated from the main network. Two Bitcoins (one worth $825 then) were demanded as payment, which later went down to one Bitcoin.
Ramakrishnan told The Times of India that various measures were taken by the hospital after the attack, including replacement of old software with Windows 10 and banning "use of external USB drives", among others.
About the recent WannaCry attack, he is quoted by The Times of India as saying:
We would have been in a soup had we not upgraded. In the last four days, people have begun to understand the importance of such measures.
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