Disgruntled ex-employee hacks into company database; deletes data of 18k patients in Capital

New Delhi: Personal and medical information of 18,000 patients in Delhi was deleted from a private company's database by a hacker in North-West Delhi's Aadarsh Nagar area. Police sources said that data from at least one or two hospitals, including those treating COVID-19 patients were deleted but later recovered, adding that they had arrested an IT graduate in the case, a former employee of the company.

According to police, the CEO of the company had filed a complaint with the Cyber Crime portal of the North-West District. The company offers various IT services, including a wide range of hospital management systems starting from shift management systems for staff to patients data management systems for healthcare facilities. "The data maintained by us is highly confidential and critical in nature as it contains demographics, financials, and various health records of patients," the complainant told police.

The complainant further said that an unknown person had hacked the database of his company and deleted some information and data of some COVID-19 hospitals and other hospitals. Deputy Commissioner of Police (North West) Vijayanta Arya said that the unique IP address of the sender was tracked back with the mobile service provider for the given slot of time as technical surveillance protocol and it was traced back to one Vikesh Sharma, who was later nabbed from Delhi.

According to police, he confessed to having executed four other cyber-attacks and deleted the data of around 18,000 patients, the billing information of approximately three lakh patients and made false entries of around 22,000 patients.

The district cyber cell team under inspector Sanjay Kumar solved the case. "Accused confessed his guilt and disclosed that he is a post-graduate in M.Sc (IT) and was working as a senior software engineer in the complainant's company," DCP Arya said. She added that during the lockdown, Sharma was fired from the company due to salary negotiations that went sour.

"As he had complete knowledge of the structure and loopholes of the website, so he decided to cause financial loss to the company so that the company being dependent on him as senior software solution provider will have to engage him back for his professional services for finding a solution to the provider," police said, adding that Sharma lives in Shahdara.