Brian Krebs reports that he received a tip about physicians’ data up for sale on a darknet marketplace called AlphaBay One of the databases for sale was a large text file called, “Tenet Health Hilton Medical Center” that contained the name, address, Social Security number and other sensitive information on dozens of physicians across the country.
Did you ever hear about that breach? I never did – not under that name, but it turns out in September, 2014 I had reported the breach on PHIprivacy.net in my report on PST, a McKesson subsidiary. I just didn’t know at that time that Tenet Health was another affected client as there was no entry for them on HHS’s public breach tool.
It’s interesting that some of the data are up for sale now. How many times have we heard entities say “We have no evidence of misuse?” InCompass Health was surprised to learn that the data were up for sale when Brian contacted them.
I wonder what they will do now. Will they send a second notification/update to say, “Hey, we just learned your data are up for sale” or will they figure they’ve already covered themselves in their first notification?
And how much more of the data may be up for sale? Keep in mind that data were reportedly exposed on the Internet between December 1, 2013 and April, 2014, when the breach was detected and the data were secured.
Trot on over to KrebsOnSecurity.com for more info on how healthcare entity breaches result in patient (and provider) information getting around.
This begs two questions: a) is the data still accurate enough to be usable, resp. has every user been informed and (hopefully) changed whatever they could (ok, you can’t probably change your SSN)? And b) If it is posted only now is that just regurgitating the information, now that it has already been successfully exploited by the original perpetrators or resp., have these found the data “wanting” and now try to dump them on less sophisticated criminals?
Both very good questions.
I suspect that whether the data is absolutely accurate is of little concern to the common citizen whose mental health records have been disclosed or to the politician whose career is ruined when his or her drug or alcohol abuse treatment records have been disclosed. One thing about one’s medical history, unlike a credit card number, it cannot be changed.